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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 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.

3. Department of Justice’s Office of Legal Counsel – May 30, 2005

  • By Anna Mulrine Staff writer

This memo describes in detail the last waterboarding of Abu Zubaydah, who was held for several years as a “ghost detainee” in the CIA’s secret prison system. He is currently being held at Guantánamo Bay.

Mr. Zubaydah was waterboarded 83 times and subjected to other interrogation techniques, including forced nudity and sleep deprivation. At this point, Zubaydah had been waterboarded 82 times, and interrogators in the CIA’s secret “black” detention sites overseas had decided he was compliant. Senior officials at the CIA disagreed, however, and ordered that he be waterboarded one more time. To this end, they sent a few top officials to witness Zubaydah’s last waterboarding session. “It was clear after it that they didn’t get anything else from Zubaydah, and after that they didn’t use any more enhanced interrogation techniques on him,” Abdo says.

It’s a “remarkable document, because it captures just how much control senior administration officials had on minute details of the program,” he adds. “The program was micromanaged from the very top and was designed and implemented from the very top – and yet the only accountability we’ve seen is from low-level interrogators.”

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Mark Sappenfield
Editor

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