Washington, August 27: The first detailed picture of how so-called high value detainees spent their days inside secret Central Intelligence Agency-run prisons overseas has emerged in dozens of previously classified documents released this week. And the picture is chilling.
A detainee could be forced to stand, almost naked, handcuffed, going days without sleep, and if that failed to break his will, there were other methods for interrogators at secret prisons to try.
The “black sites” were run with the singular goal of extracting potentially valuable information from some of the most high-profile terror suspects in US custody, and there was a clear theory about how that should be done.
“The effectiveness of the program depends on persuading the detainee, early in the application of these techniques, that he’s dependent on the interrogators and that he lacks control over his situation,” wrote Steven Bradbury, then a senior attorney at the Office of Legal Counsel, an office that gives the president legal advice.
The 2007 memorandum is part of a record that describes the creation of a program put in place by former president George W Bush’s administration in the wake of the September 11, 2001 attacks.
It included the formulation of so-called enhanced interrogation techniques, which could be applied with increasing severity the longer detainees refused to provide information.
–Agencies