CIA Black Sites and the Torture Report
A bipartisan Senate investigation spent five years and reviewed six million pages of documents before concluding the CIA's post-9/11 interrogation program was more brutal than the agency had told Congress — and didn't produce the intelligence breakthroughs it claimed.
Following the September 11 attacks, the CIA operated a network of secret overseas detention facilities, known as black sites, where detainees were subjected to interrogation techniques including waterboarding. A 2014 bipartisan U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee report, following a five-year investigation reviewing millions of pages of internal CIA documents, concluded the program was more brutal than previously disclosed and did not produce unique, otherwise unobtainable intelligence as the CIA had claimed.
- →Following the September 11, 2001 attacks, the CIA established a network of secret overseas detention facilities, known as black sites, in various countries, where terrorism suspects were held and interrogated outside the standard U.S. legal and military justice systems.
- →Interrogation techniques used at these facilities, formally termed "enhanced interrogation techniques" by the Bush administration, included waterboarding, sleep deprivation, and other methods widely characterized by international law and human rights organizations as torture.
- →The Senate Intelligence Committee conducted a five-year investigation, reviewing over six million pages of internal CIA documents, resulting in a formal 2014 report, portions of which were declassified and released publicly.
- →The declassified report concluded the program was more brutal than the CIA had previously disclosed to Congress and the public, and specifically found the techniques did not produce unique, otherwise unobtainable intelligence, directly contradicting the CIA's own prior public defense of the program's effectiveness.