WASHINGTON — A partially declassified CIA report released Monday by the Obama administration describes the early implementation of the agency’s interrogation program in 2002 and 2003 as ad hoc and poorly supervised, leading to the use of “unauthorized, improvised, inhumane and undocumented” techniques.
Interrogators lifted one detainee off the floor by his arms while they were bound behind his back with a belt. Another interrogator used a stiff brush to clean a detainee, scrubbing so roughly that his legs were raw with abrasions. And another squeezed a detainee’s neck at his carotid artery until he began to pass out.
Authorized techniques such as waterboarding were applied in a manner that exceeded the language of Justice Department memos that authorized their use. Interrogators “continuously applied large volumes of water,” explaining afterward that they needed to make the experience “more poignant and convincing,” the report said.
In releasing the report and other documents, President Barack Obama continued to confront the legacy of his predecessor’s counterterrorism policies while attempting to move beyond them. On Monday, the administration also appointed a prosecutor to investigate allegations of detainee abuse by the CIA and unveiled an elite interagency interrogation team designed to break high-value suspects without coercion.
Cumulatively, the newly released documents provide a forensic accounting of some of the Bush administration’s most closely held secrets and deepen public knowledge of a program whose scope and details have emerged piecemeal ever since the first suspected high-level al-Qaeda detainee was questioned in 2002 at a hastily assembled “black site” in Thailand.
The Obama administration was forced to release the CIA documents because of a wide-ranging Freedom of Information Act lawsuit originally filed in 2003 by the American Civil Liberties Union.
“The report underscores the need for a comprehensive criminal investigation that reaches not just the interrogators who exceeded authority but the senior officials who authorized torture and the Justice Department lawyers who facilitated it,” said Jameel Jaffer, the director of the organization’s national-security program.
“Inadequate at first”
The releases Monday follow the earlier dissemination of Justice Department memos sanctioning the use of harsh interrogation techniques, as well as the Obama administration’s decisions to end the CIA program and close the military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
The inspector-general report said that the CIA’s efforts to provide “systematic, clear and timely guidance” to interrogators were “inadequate at first” and that that failure largely coincided with the most significant incidents involving the unauthorized coercion of detainees. Significant portions of the report were not made public, including the inspector general’s recommendations.
Interrogators menaced a detainee with a handgun and a power drill, staged mock executions to convince suspects that they too could be killed, and threatened to punish the family of another detainee.
“We’re going to kill your children,” one interrogator told Khalid Sheik Mohammed, the self-proclaimed mastermind of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on New York and Washington, if there was another attack.
The report found that “there is no doubt” that the detention and interrogation program itself prevented further terrorist activity, provided information that led to the apprehension of other terrorists, warned authorities of future plots, and helped analysts complete an intelligence picture for senior policy-makers and military leaders.
But whether the harsh techniques were effective in this regard “is a more subjective process and not without some concern.”
The CIA also released two documents that then-Vice President Dick Cheney had invoked to assert that the harsh tactics worked and “kept us safe for seven years.”
CIA Director Leon Panetta, in a message to agency employees Monday morning, described the release of the documents as “in many ways an old story” and said that “the challenge is not the battles of yesterday, but those of today and tomorrow.”
