Skip to footer

CIA's harsh interrogation techniques: three key memos now online

The most detailed documents describing the Central Intelligence Agency’s secret interrogation, rendition, and detention program are now online in the American Civil Liberties Union’s new Torture Database. Here are three of the most important memos (links included) of the 5,000-plus that the ACLU obtained through Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests and legal challenges going back to 2003, according to Alexander Abdo, staff attorney for the ACLU’s National Security Project.

“For the first eight months, the government refused to even process our requests. They argued that it was too time-consuming,” Mr. Abdo says. “The federal courts ultimately rejected this argument, ruling that we are a government of laws and FOIA is one of those laws.” 

1. Special review by the CIA Inspector General’s Office – May 7, 2004

  • By Anna Mulrine Staff writer

This is a description of the CIA’s rendition, detention, and interrogation program, and it's “perhaps the most significant document to come out of the FOIA,” says Abdo. “It’s a fascinating and morbid document to read.”

It is also the document that Attorney General Eric Holder read twice before deciding to initiate a criminal investigation into CIA interrogators who ignored US laws prohibiting torture. “Unfortunately, the investigation focused narrowly on this, rather than the architects of the torture program,” Abdo says. 

The memo cites “CIA interrogators who far exceeded the guidance they were given,” Abdo says – including one interrogator who threatened a prisoner with a handgun and a power drill and forced him to smoke cigarettes until he vomited.

The review was initiated in part because CIA officers were concerned that they were committing human rights violations as part of the program, Abdo notes. It concluded that “in the end they couldn’t even say that the program was effective,” he says.

1 of 3
Mark Sappenfield
Editor

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

Subscribe to insightful journalism

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.