America's Torture Program

How America Legalized Torture

Within weeks of 9/11, Vice President Dick Cheney told Meet the Press that the US would need to work “the dark side.” The CIA requested authority to use “enhanced interrogation techniques” — a euphemism borrowed from the Gestapo's Verschärfte Vernehmung. The Office of Legal Counsel, led by John Yoo and Jay Bybee, obliged with memos that redefined torture so narrowly that almost anything short of organ failure was permissible.

The legal reasoning was breathtaking in its cynicism. Yoo argued that for pain to constitute torture, it must be “equivalent in intensity to the pain accompanying serious physical injury, such as organ failure, impairment of bodily function, or even death.” By this definition, waterboarding — which causes the sensation of drowning and has been prosecuted as torture for centuries — was perfectly legal.

Jay Bybee, who signed the memos, was rewarded with a lifetime appointment to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. John Yoo returned to his tenured professorship at UC Berkeley. Neither faced any legal consequence. The DOJ's Office of Professional Responsibility found they had committed “professional misconduct,” but a senior official overruled the finding, downgrading it to “poor judgment.”

“Enhanced Interrogation”: What They Actually Did

The CIA's “enhanced interrogation techniques” were reverse-engineered from the military's SERE program — which was designed to train American soldiers to resist torture by enemy states. Psychologists James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen, who had zero interrogation experience, were paid $81 million to turn a resistance-training program into an offensive torture program.

Waterboarding involves strapping a person to a board, covering their face with cloth, and pouring water to simulate drowning. The sensation triggers an involuntary panic response — the body believes it is dying. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was waterboarded 183 times in a single month. Abu Zubaydah was waterboarded 83 times. After WWII, the United States prosecuted Japanese soldiers for waterboarding American POWs and sentenced them to 15 years of hard labor.

Rectal feeding — the forced infusion of nutrients through the rectum — was used on at least five detainees. The Senate report found this had no medical necessity and was used as a means of “behavior control.” In any other context, this would be called sexual assault.

Sleep deprivation was used for up to 180 hours (7.5 days). Detainees were kept awake by being shackled in standing positions, doused with cold water, and subjected to constant noise and light. After 96 hours without sleep, humans begin to hallucinate. The CIA used this on over 50 detainees.

The CIA's Global Network of Secret Prisons

The CIA operated “black sites” — secret prisons — in at least seven countries. Detainees were transported on unmarked planes through a network of shell companies. The European Court of Human Rights later found that Poland, Romania, and Lithuania violated fundamental human rights by hosting these sites. Fifty-four countries participated in the CIA's “extraordinary rendition” program — kidnapping suspects and transporting them to countries known for torture.

The first black site, codenamed “Cat's Eye,” opened in Thailand in 2002. Abu Zubaydah was its first prisoner. When Thai officials grew nervous, the CIA moved operations to Poland (codename “Quartz”), then Romania (“Bright Light”), and Lithuania (“Violet”). The Salt Pit in Afghanistan — a facility so cold that a detainee froze to death — was run by a CIA officer with no interrogation training who was later recommended for a cash bonus.

Abu Ghraib: The Photos America Can't Unsee

In April 2004, CBS's 60 Minutes II broadcast photographs from Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq that shocked the world. American soldiers — grinning, giving thumbs up — posed with naked, hooded Iraqi prisoners who had been stacked in human pyramids, forced to simulate sexual acts, terrorized with dogs, beaten, and humiliated. One iconic image showed a hooded man standing on a box with electrical wires attached to his hands.

The Bush administration called it the work of “a few bad apples.” But the Schlesinger Report and subsequent investigations found that the abuse was systemic, that interrogation techniques approved by Secretary Rumsfeld for Guantánamo had migrated to Iraq, and that military intelligence had directed guards to “soften up” detainees for questioning.

The People America Tortured

The Senate Torture Report confirmed that at least 26 of the 119 CIA detainees were wrongfully held — they had no connection to terrorism. The CIA's own records showed that interrogators frequently had no idea who they were torturing or what information they were seeking. Some detainees were handed over by Afghan warlords for bounties — the US distributed leaflets offering $5,000 per “terrorist” delivered.

The Senate Torture Report: The Truth, Buried

In December 2014, after a six-year investigation, the Senate Intelligence Committee released a 525-page executive summary of its 6,700-page study on the CIA's detention and interrogation program. The full report has never been released — the CIA and successive administrations have fought to keep it classified.

The report's findings were devastating:

Senator Dianne Feinstein, who led the investigation, said: “The report exposes brutality that stands in stark contrast to our values as a nation.” The CIA fought the investigation at every step — including hacking into Senate staffers' computers to monitor their work. CIA Director John Brennan initially denied the hacking, then admitted it and apologized. He faced no consequences.

Guantánamo Bay: The Prison That Won't Close

The detention facility at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba was deliberately placed outside US territory to avoid constitutional protections. At its peak, it held 780 detainees. Of those, only 8 were ever convicted of any crime. The majority — over 700 — were released without charge, many after years of detention. As of 2025, approximately 15 detainees remain.

Force feeding became routine at Guantánamo as detainees went on hunger strikes to protest their indefinite detention. The procedure involves strapping a person to a chair, forcing a tube through their nose into their stomach, and pumping in liquid nutrients. The UN has called force-feeding of competent prisoners a form of torture. The US military performed it daily for years.

The cost of Guantánamo is staggering: approximately $13 million per detainee per year, making it the most expensive prison on Earth. The total cost exceeds $7 billion. For comparison, a federal supermax prison costs about $78,000 per inmate per year. Every president since Bush has promised to close it. None have.

It Didn't Even Work

This is the final indictment: it didn't work. The entire justification for the torture program was that it produced “unique, otherwise unobtainable intelligence” that prevented terrorist attacks. The Senate investigation reviewed 20 of the CIA's most frequently cited examples and found that in every single case, the information attributed to “enhanced interrogation” was either fabricated by detainees, already known from other sources, or did not lead to any actionable intelligence.

The CIA's claim that torture helped find Osama bin Laden — dramatized in the film Zero Dark Thirty — was specifically debunked by the Senate report. The key intelligence that led to bin Laden's courier came from conventional intelligence methods, not from tortured detainees. In fact, KSM — waterboarded 183 times — actively misled interrogators about the courier.

Professional interrogators — including the FBI's Ali Soufan, who had been successfully interrogating Abu Zubaydah using rapport-based techniques before the CIA took over — have consistently testified that torture produces unreliable information. People being tortured will say anything to make it stop. This is not a novel finding. It has been known for centuries. The United States chose to ignore it.

Zero Accountability

No senior official has ever been prosecuted for the US torture program. Not the lawyers who authorized it. Not the CIA directors who oversaw it. Not the psychologists who designed it. Not the interrogators who carried it out. Not the president who approved it.

In 2009, Attorney General Eric Holder appointed a special prosecutor to investigate the CIA's treatment of detainees. In 2012, the investigation was closed without any charges — even in the cases where detainees died in custody. President Obama's stated position: “We need to look forward as opposed to looking backwards.”

The only people punished for Abu Ghraib were 11 low-ranking soldiers. Specialist Charles Graner received the longest sentence: 10 years (served 6.5). Lynndie England, the woman in the most infamous photos, served 521 days. The officers and officials who created the conditions for abuse — Rumsfeld, who approved the techniques; General Sanchez, who authorized their use in Iraq; the military intelligence officers who directed guards to “soften up” prisoners — faced nothing.

The Legacy: America Lost Its Moral Authority

Before the War on Terror, the United States could credibly lecture other nations about human rights. It had prosecuted Nazi war criminals at Nuremberg. It had condemned Soviet gulags. It had championed the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the Geneva Conventions. That credibility is gone.

When the US criticizes China for Xinjiang, Beijing points to Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo. When it condemns Russia's treatment of prisoners in Ukraine, Moscow cites the Senate Torture Report. When it lectures any country on human rights, the answer is the same: you waterboarded people 183 times and promoted the woman who ran the black site to CIA Director.

The torture program also served as a recruiting tool for extremists. Abu Ghraib photos appeared in ISIS propaganda. Former Guantánamo detainees — radicalized by their treatment — joined militant groups after release. The program didn't make America safer. It created new enemies, destroyed alliances, contaminated legal proceedings, and permanently damaged the idea that the United States stands for something better than the regimes it fights against.

Sources & Further Reading