Interview: Torture and the CIA

It is now widely acknowledged that after the 9/11

attacks in the US, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) began a global
detention and interrogation program through which it tortured and
abused prisoners. Yet the US government has failed to hold accountable
both those who designed and authorized the program and the agents
who directly carried out the abuses. Laura Pitter, senior US national
security counsel at Human Rights Watch, interviewed many former
detainees who were tortured by the CIA. She talks to Stephanie Hancock about
what they went through and why itsimportant they get justice.

This is a long and complex story. What did you find?

In the years after 9/11, the US basically abducted or were handed scores
of men throughout the world, held them in secret locations, and tortured
or otherwise mistreated them. Yet theres been zero accountability for
these crimes.
You spent a lot of time interviewing victims of CIA torture. What shocked
you the most?
What gets under my skin is speaking to people who were tortured, and
knowing that the US government did this to them. Hearing people
describe the depravity of the conditions they were held in, seeing them
draw instruments of torture, hearing how they were kept in diapers, hung
from ceilings, nearly suffocated, dunked in ice water. It was a total lack
of humanity, and, as an American, knowing that the US was involved in
that is very hard.
What kinds of torture and ill-treatment did they suffer?

Many were put in diapers, or held naked and

forced to defecate on themselves... All of them
were endlessly interrogated.
They were held in pitch dark, windowless cells for months on end. They
were deprived of sleep and forced to stand for days at a time if their
legs buckled, they were forced to hang by their arms instead. At least
one detainee was forced to stay awake for seven days in a row. They
were slammed into walls a practice called walling and put in painful
stress positions for days. Several were subjected to water boarding,
which dates back to the days of the Spanish Inquisition, and something
the CIA called water dousing which often involved forcing detainees

into ice cold water, and pouring water over their face until they couldnt
breathe. Many were put in diapers, or held naked and forced to defecate
on themselves. One was forced to stand upright with his hands
handcuffed above his head, in a narrow box with loudspeakers right next
to each ear that played loud, screaming music at him for one full day
and a half. He had a broken leg at the time but was made to stand on it
anyway. All of them were endlessly interrogated.
How did torture like this ever get authorized?
In the days following the 9/11 attacks in the US, the CIA wanted to use
10 so-called enhanced interrogation techniques on detainees, including
water boarding, painful stress positions and days of sleep deprivation.
But it had a problem: these practices are torture the US Army field
manual even banned many of the techniques and torture is a crime
under both US and international law.
The CIA asked the criminal division of Department of Justice for a
guarantee that anyone using these techniques would be immune from
prosecution, but the request was rejected.
So the CIA and senior White House officials went to a small team of
Justice Department lawyers located within the White House the Office
of Legal Counsel. They said yes, and eventually wrote memos, later
roundly discredited, stating that the techniques did not constitute
torture.
Thats how this government-sanctioned program of torture came about.

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Some detainees were chained to two iron rings that came out of a wall, about one metre above the
ground, in various different positions. One former detainee said he spent two weeks in Position 3, only
being unchained for 30 minutes per day.

But isnt torture illegal under US law?

Yes. A 1994 federal statute, enacted when the US ratified the United
Nations Convention against Torture, makes the use of torture a criminal
offense. But the memo re-defined torture very narrowly only as a
practice that causes pain similar to that of organ failure, impairment of
bodily function, or death. So under that definition, an interrogator who,
for example, broke the detainees bones or nearly drowned them, would
not be deemed to have committed torture because it would not result
in organ failure or death. The CIA used this completely twisted definition
of torture to approve the specific techniques.
How many people were tortured by the CIA?
The CIA maintains that its practices did not amount to torture but the
public record clearly refutes this. The Senate Intelligence Committee put
out a 500 page summary of a much larger, still classified 6,700 page
report in December last year. That Senate report summary says that the
CIA detained at least 119 people under its program, but also that this is a

very conservative estimate. It also makes clear that this number does
not include detainees who were rendered [transferred] to other
countries by the US, many of whom were then tortured. The full number
is something the US public deserves to know and the US government has
a legal obligation to provide.
Do you think any detainees in the CIA program were guilty?

The CIA has no real history and experience of

interrogations...a lot of the information they got
was false or insignificant.
Those apprehended who committed crimes should be properly tried by
federal courts. But the CIA program was never about guilt or innocence,
it was about getting information from people whom the CIA thought had
intelligence about terrorist attacks. The CIA was supposed to only detain
those they believed posed an imminent threat to the US or were
planning specific attacks, but in reality they rounded up a lot of people
without basis and tortured them to find out if they knew anything. The
CIA has no real history and experience of interrogations, though, and no
idea how to do them in an effective and lawful manner. A lot of the
information they got was false or insignificant.
What kind of misleading information did the abusive interrogations
obtain?
Theres the case of Khalid Sheikh Mohamed, who is accused of
masterminding the 9/11 attacks. After many rounds of waterboarding
and other forms of torture, he told interrogators that some African
Americans in Montana were planning something big. This was completely
false something he said just to get his torture to stop. The CIA admits
this. Then there was Sheikh Ibn Al-Libi, who, after rounds of torture,
provided false information connecting Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein to Al-

Qaeda. He recanted it later but nevertheless, Secretary of State Colin

Powell used this information when he delivered his UN Security Council
speech seeking its approval to go to war against Iraq. Powell has since
said he regrets using this information.
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Doesnt torture provide useful information?

Professional interrogators say that interrogations are much more

effective without the use of torture. Torture pushes detainees to provide
wrong or misleading information or to resist in ways they may not have
before just to get the torture to stop. Under such circumstances, sorting
out the accurate from the false information becomes difficult. The FBI
refused to participate in the CIA program because torture was ineffective
as well as unlawful.
A sketch by a former CIA detainee depicts a wooden board to which he was
strapped and on which his interrogators put him to undergo waterboarding.

Even if unlawful, wasnt the CIA program effective in preventing terrorist

attacks on US soil?
The Senate report summary shows that the CIA did not get actionable
intelligence on serious terrorist threats from its entire program. The CIA
tried to suggest it produced more than a morsel or two of useful
information, but the program did not lead to Osama Bin Laden, and it did
not stop the shoe bomber plot or anything else. Claims the CIA made
about the efficacy of the intelligence it gathered were false or
exaggerated.
The US Justice Department says its investigated alleged torture. Has it?

In any credible criminal investigation, the first

thing you do is interview alleged victims of the
crime.
The US has yet to conduct a credible investigation into the allegations of
CIA torture. It opened one investigation in 2009. But this investigation
was flawed from the start because it only looked into abuses beyond
those purportedly authorized when authorization of the program itself
should have been the main focus. Prosecutors looked into 101 case of
abuse but closed 99 of them in 2011 and the final two in 2012 without
bringing any charges. In addition, it appears that the Justice Department
never interviewed any detainees from the CIA program for this
investigation. In any credible criminal investigation, the first thing you do
is interview alleged victims of the crime.
But didnt President Obama shut down the program?
He did. He ended it his first full day in office. But only because the
Senate Intelligence Committee conducted an in-depth investigation that
took more than six years do we know as much as we do about the
program. But the committees full report still needs to be made public.

And those responsible need to be brought to justice. Holding the CIA and
senior White House officials to account wont be easy, but our legal
research found that obstacles to prosecution can be overcome.
Why is it important to hold senior officials to account?
No one should be above the law. These were serious crimes and the
victims deserve justice. But unless President Obama makes it clear that
these criminal acts deserve punishment, there is a danger that torture
will be treated as a policy option by a future US administration. This is
the wrong message for the American people and a terrible message to
send to other countries. And failure to take action could poison Obamas
legacy he will be remembered as the president who refused to treat
torture like the crime it is.
You met a lot of victims during your research. Whose story particularly
touched you?
What really got me was meeting a man who was held in CIA custody for
16 months. We spent hours piecing together his experience. I couldnt
work out how he was so certain of all the dates during his captivity,
because he was held in pitch darkness much of the time, so I asked him
about it. He told me that one day he was taken outside for an hour of
sun, and while outside in the light, he saw that the guards watch said
September 5, 2003. He remembered that.

As an American myself, its very hard to know my

government did this to people they were in our
custody and under our care.
Back inside, another inmate had a birds nest near his cell, and could
hear the birds singing each morning. Even though there was loud music
blaring through the entire facility 24 hours a day, the inmate was able to
shout over the noise to the others that the birds were singing - signaling
the start of a new day. This is how he was able to count the days. I

commented about the remarkable ability of human beings to adapt.

Moments later he put his head down, and I saw he had begun to cry. We
had talked for hours before that about his abuse, but it was my
recognition of his humanity that finally got to him. I will never forget that
moment. It is one of the things that drives me.
What effect has this had on you personally?
As an American myself, its very hard to know my government did this to
people they were in our custody and under our care. There is
something so insidious about inflicting pain on people consciously. I have
a lot of compassion for the victims and I think they understood I was
going to work for justice for them. They told me that was a very powerful
medicine for them.
Posted by Thavam