The CIA Torture Program: Black Sites and Enhanced Interrogation

The Program link

Following the September 11, 2001 attacks, the CIA established a network of secret detention facilities — known as “black sites” — in countries including Poland, Romania, Lithuania, Thailand, Afghanistan, and Diego Garcia. The program, authorized by a classified presidential finding signed by President George W. Bush on September 17, 2001, empowered the CIA to capture, detain, and interrogate individuals suspected of involvement in terrorism.

The CIA’s “enhanced interrogation techniques” were developed by psychologists James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen, neither of whom had experience in interrogation. Their methods, reverse-engineered from the military’s SERE (Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape) program — which was designed to prepare American soldiers for enemy torture — included waterboarding, stress positions, sleep deprivation for up to 180 hours, confinement in coffin-sized boxes, rectal feeding, ice water baths, and mock executions.

Scale and Abuses link

The CIA detained at least 119 individuals in the program. At least 39 were subjected to enhanced interrogation techniques. The Senate Intelligence Committee’s investigation found that conditions and treatment went beyond even the already brutal techniques that had been formally authorized. Detainees were chained to walls in painful positions for days. At least one detainee, Gul Rahman, died of hypothermia in a CIA black site in Afghanistan in November 2002 after being left shackled, half-naked, on a cold concrete floor. No one was held accountable for his death.

Extraordinary Rendition link

The CIA also operated a rendition program, transferring detainees to countries known to practice torture, including Egypt, Syria, Jordan, and Morocco. The program used a network of front companies and shell corporations to operate unmarked aircraft. Flight records, later obtained through litigation, documented hundreds of rendition flights through European airspace.

The Senate Torture Report link

In December 2014, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence released a 525-page executive summary of its 6,700-page report on the CIA’s detention and interrogation program. The report, based on a review of over 6.3 million pages of CIA documents, concluded that the CIA’s enhanced interrogation techniques were “not an effective means of acquiring intelligence” and that the CIA had systematically misrepresented the program’s results to Congress, the White House, and the public. The full report remains classified.

Accountability link

Psychologists Mitchell and Jessen received $81 million in CIA contracts for designing and implementing the interrogation program. A lawsuit brought by former detainees against the pair was settled in 2017 for an undisclosed amount.

John Kiriakou, a former CIA officer who publicly confirmed the existence of the waterboarding program in 2007, was the only person connected to the CIA torture program to serve prison time. He was sentenced to 30 months for disclosing classified information. No one who authorized, designed, or carried out torture was criminally prosecuted by the United States.

The European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) has ruled against Poland (2014), Romania (2018), and Lithuania (2018) for hosting CIA black sites and enabling torture within their borders, ordering those countries to pay damages to victims.

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