American Civil Liberties Union

Last month, in a bitterly disappointing 6-5 decision, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals pulled the plug on the lawsuit brought by Binyam Mohamed and four others against Boeing subsidiary Jeppesen Dataplan for assisting the CIA in delivering them into the hands of foreign governments to be tortured.

These pages are from the May 7, 2004, report of the CIA's Inspector General on the agency's Rendition, Detention, and Interrogation program, which even in its still heavily-redacted form is one of the most important documents unearthed to date. This passage summarizes the threatened execution of Abd Al-Rahim Al-Nashiri by a CIA agent in a secret CIA prison in Thailand. Death threats are specifically prohibited under international and U.S. laws banning torture. But when the CIA's Inspector General referred this case to the Justice Department that year, the agency received assurances from the Justice Department that it would not prosecute.

Yesterday, we posted “Marching Orders,” which is Part 2 of Chapter 5, “The Battle Lab.”

In Part 1 of this Chapter we followed the seven-week “special interrogation” of Mohammed al Qahtani in Guantánamo Bay 's Camp X-Ray at the end of 2002. This new section, which begins with the arrival of the first planeload of prisoners in Guantánamo at the beginning of 2002 and spans the facility's first year, looks at how two commanders who were getting their marching orders directly from the White House sought to turn the camp into a “Battle Lab” for abusive interrogation techniques, even as the evidence was mounting that many of the detainees were of no intelligence value whatsoever, and as wave after wave of servicemen and women, officers, military lawyers, FBI agents — indeed, almost everyone outside a tight circle of zealous decision makers and inexperienced interrogators — warned that the techniques we were employing were ineffective, first of all, and secondly were the very ones we had long denounced elsewhere as torture.

The CIA wasn't the only agency to videotape interrogations—or to make tapes disappear.

In 2007, during the trial of alleged would-be dirty-bomber Jose Padilla, prosecutors admitted they had not turned over to his defense team all of the videotapes the U.S. military had recorded of his interrogations — and that the one tape it had not produced was the recording of the final interrogation session before Padilla was finally allowed to meet with attorneys after almost two years in incommunicado detention in a naval brig in North Carolina. By then the government had abandoned the dirty bomb plot allegation, a plot it had constructed and supported through serial torture.