CIA black sites and the torture program

In March 2002 Pakistani and American forces captured Abu Zubaydah, a man the CIA believed was a senior al-Qaeda figure. He was flown to a secret CIA prison in Thailand, where interrogators kept him awake for days, confined him in a coffin sized box and waterboarded him 83 times. Over the next six years the agency held at least 119 people in a network of secret prisons, known as black sites, in countries including Afghanistan, Thailand, Poland, Romania and Lithuania. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the planner of the September 11 attacks, was waterboarded 183 times. At least one prisoner, Gul Rahman, died of hypothermia at the Salt Pit near Kabul in November 2002.²³⁵

The program began with a presidential order signed on September 17, 2001, giving the CIA authority to capture and detain terrorism suspects. Justice Department lawyers wrote memos in August 2002 that narrowly defined torture, and the agency used those memos to approve what it called enhanced interrogation techniques. Prisoners were moved between countries by secret flights, a practice called extraordinary rendition, and the International Committee of the Red Cross was kept away.²⁹

President George W. Bush acknowledged the program in September 2006, when 14 prisoners were moved to Guantanamo Bay. In 2005 the CIA destroyed 92 videotapes of interrogations. President Barack Obama banned the techniques by executive order in January 2009. In December 2014 the Senate Intelligence Committee released a roughly 500 page summary of its 6,700 page study, concluding that the methods were more brutal than the CIA had told policymakers and did not produce intelligence unavailable by other means, a conclusion the CIA disputed.¹³⁴⁵⁶