The Senate Intelligence Committee Report on Torture: Committee Study of the Central Intelligence Agency's Detention and Interrogation Program (53 page)

On August 13, 2004, CIA attorneys, medical officers, and other personnel met with Department of Justice attorneys to discuss some of the techniques for which the CIA was seeking approval, in particular sleep deprivation, water dousing, and the waterboard. When asked about the possibility that detainees subjected to standing sleep deprivation could suffer from edema, OMS doctors informed the Department of Justice attorneys that it was not a problem as the CIA would “adjust shackles or [the] method of applying the technique as necessary to prevent edema, as well as any chafing or over-tightness from the shackles.” With regard to water dousing, CIA officers represented that “water is at normal temperature; CIA makes no effort to ‘cool’ the water before applying it.” With respect to the waterboard, CIA officers indicated that “each application could not last more than 40 seconds (and usually only lasted about 20 seconds).”
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As detailed in the full Committee Study, each of these representations was incongruent with the operational history of the CIA program.

On August 25, 2004, the CIA’s Associate General Counsel █████████ sent a letter to the OLC stating that Janat Gul, who had been rendered to CIA custody on July █, 2004, had been subjected to the attention grasp, walling, facial hold, facial slap, wall standing, stress positions, and sleep deprivation. The letter further stated that CIA interrogators “assess Gul not to be cooperating, and to be using a sophisticated counterinterrogation strategy,” and that the further use of the same enhanced interrogation techniques would be “unlikely to move Gul to cooperate absent concurrent use” of dietary manipulation, nudity, water dousing, and the abdominal slap. The letter referenced the reporting from a CIA source,
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stating: “CIA understands that before his capture, Gul had been working to facilitate a direct meeting between the ██████ CIA ██████ source reporting on the pre-election threat and Abu Faraj [al-Libi] himself.”
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The following day, August 26, 2004, Acting Assistant Attorney General Daniel Levin informed CIA Acting General Counsel John Rizzo that the use of the four additional interrogation techniques did not violate any U.S. statutes, the U.S. Constitution, or U.S. treaty obligations. Levin’s advice relied on the CIA’s representations about Gul, including that “there are no medical and psychological contraindications to the use of these techniques as you plan to employ them on Gul.”
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At the time, CIA records indicated: (1) that standing sleep deprivation had already caused significant swelling in Gul’s legs; (2) that standing sleep deprivation continued despite Gul’s visual and auditory hallucinations and that Gul was “not oriented to time or place”;
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(3) that CIA interrogators on-site did not believe that “escalation to enhanced pressures will increase [Gul’s] ability to produce timely accurate locational and threat information”;
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and (4) that CIA interrogators did not believe that Gul was “withholding imminent threat information.”
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Levin’s August 26, 2004, letter to Rizzo was based on the premise that “[w]e understand that [Janat] Gul is a high-value al Qaeda operative who is believed to possess information concerning an imminent terrorist threat to the United States.”
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Levin’s understanding was based on the CIA’s representation that “Gul had been working to facilitate a direct meeting between the
███████
CIA
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source reporting on the pre-election threat and Abu Faraj [al-Libi].”
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This information later proved to be inaccurate. As detailed elsewhere in this summary, the threat of a terrorist attack to precede the November 2004 U.S. election was found to be based on a CIA source whose information was questioned by senior CTC officials at the time.
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The same CIA source admitted to fabricating the information after a
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in
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October 2004.
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In November 2004, after the use of the CIA’s enhanced interrogation techniques on Janat Gul, CIA’s chief of Base at DETENTION SITE BLACK, where Janat Gul was interrogated, wrote that “describing [Gul] as ‘highest ranking’ gives him a stature which is undeserved, overblown and misleading.” The chief of Base added that “[s]tating that [Gul] had ‘long standing access to senior leaders in al-Qa’ida’ is simply wrong.”
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In December 2004, CIA officers concluded that Janat Gul was “not the link to senior AQ leaders that [CIA Headquarters] said he was/is,”
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and in April 2005 CIA officers wrote that “[t]here simply is no ‘smoking gun’ that we can refer to that would justify our continued holding of [Janat Gul].”
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By April 2005, as the OLC neared completion of a new memorandum analyzing the legality of the CIA’s enhanced interrogation techniques, the OLC sought information from the CIA on “what [the CIA] got from Janat Gul, was it valuable, [and] did it help anything . . .” The CIA did not immediately respond to this request, and the CIA’s Associate General Counsel noted that DOJ personnel had “taken to calling [him] daily” for additional information.”
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Subsequently, on April 15, 2005, the CIA informed the OLC that “during most of Gul’s debriefings, he has sought to minimize his knowledge of extremist activities and has provided largely non-incriminating information about his involvement in their networks.”
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On May 10, 2005, the OLC issued a memorandum that stated, “[y]ou informed us that the CIA believed Gul had information about al Qaeda’s plans to launch an attack within the United States . . . [o]ur conclusions depend on these assessments.” The OLC referenced █████’s August 25, 2004, letter on Gul and the pre-election threat.
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In a May 30, 2005, memorandum, the OLC referred to Janat Gul as “representative of the high value detainees on whom enhanced techniques have been, or might be used,” and wrote that “the CIA believed [that Janat Gul] had actionable intelligence concerning the pre-election threat to the United States.”
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In the same memorandum, the OLC conveyed a new CIA representation describing the effectiveness of the CIA’s enhanced interrogation techniques on Janat Gul, which stated:

“Gul has provided information that has helped the CIA with validating one of its key assets reporting on the pre-election threat.”
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There arc no indications in the memorandum that the CIA informed the OLC that it had concluded that Gul had no information about the pre-election threat, which was the basis on which the OLC had approved the use of the CIA’s enhanced interrogation techniques against Gul in the first place, or that CIA officers had determined that Gul was “not the man we thought he was.” In September 2004, the OLC advised the CIA that the use of the CIA’s enhanced interrogation techniques against Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani and Sharif al-Masri was also legal, based on the CIA representations that the two detainees were al-Qa’ida operatives involved in the “operational planning” of the pre-election plot against the United States.
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This CIA assessment was based on the same fabrications from the same CIA questions from the same CIA source.
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Like Janat Gul, Ghailani and al-Masri were subjected to extended sleep deprivation and experienced hallucinations.
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D. May 2005 OLC Memoranda Rely on Inaccurate Representations from the CIA Regarding the Interrogation Process, the CIA’s Enhanced Interrogation Techniques, and the Effectiveness of the Techniques

On May 4, 2005, Acting Assistant Attorney General Steven Bradbury faxed to CIA Associate General Counsel
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questions related to the CIA’s enhanced interrogation techniques, in which Bradbury referenced medical journal articles. The following day, ██████ sent a letter to Bradbury stating that the CIA’s responses had been composed by the CIA’s Office of Medical Services (OMS). The CIA response stated that any lowering of the threshold of pain caused by sleep deprivation was “not germane” to the program, because studies had only identified differences in sensitivity to heat, cold, and pressure, and the CIA’s enhanced interrogation techniques “do not involve application of heat, cold, pressure, any sharp objects (or indeed any objects at all).”
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With regard to the effect of sleep deprivation on the experience of water dousing, the CIA response stated that “at the temperatures of water we have recommended for the program the likelihood of induction of pain by water dousing is very low under any circumstances, and not a phenomenon we have seen in detainees subject to this technique.”
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In response to Bradbury’s query as to when edema or shackling would become painful as a result of standing sleep deprivation, the CIA responded, “[w]e have not observed this phenomenon in the interrogations performed to date, and have no reason to believe on theoretical grounds that edema or shackling would be more painful,” provided the shackles are maintained with “appropriate slack” and “interrogators follow medical officers’ recommendation to end standing sleep deprivation and use an alternate technique when the medical officer judges that edema is significant in any way.” The CIA response added that the medical officers’ recommendations “are always followed,” and that “[d]etainees have not complained about pain from edema.” Much of this information was inaccurate.
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Bradbury further inquired whether it was “possible to tell reliably (e.g. from outward physical signs like grimaces) whether a detainee is experiencing severe pain.” The CIA responded that “all pain is subjective, not objective,”
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adding:

“Medical officers can monitor for evidence of condition or injury that most people would consider painful, and can observe the individual for outward displays and expressions associated with the experience of pain. Medical officer [
sic
] can and do ask the subject, after the interrogation session has concluded, if he is in pain, and have and do provide analgesics, such as Tylenol and Aleve, to detainees who report headache and other discomforts during their interrogations. We reiterate, that an interrogation session would be stopped if, in the judgment of the interrogators or medical personnel, medical attention was required.”
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As described elsewhere, multiple CIA detainees were subjected to the CIA’s enhanced interrogation techniques despite their medical conditions.
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Bradbury’s fax also inquired whether monitoring and safeguards “will effectively avoid severe physical pain or suffering for detainees,” which was a formulation of the statutory definition of torture under consideration. Despite concerns from OMS that its assessments could be used to support a legal review of the CIA’s enhanced interrogation techniques,
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the CIA’s response stated:

“[i]t is OMS’s view that based on our limited experience and the extensive experience of the military with these techniques, the program in place has effectively avoided severe physical pain and suffering, and should continue to do so. Application of the thirteen techniques
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has not to date resulted in any severe or permanent physical injury (or any injury other than transient bruising), and we do not expect this to change.”
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In May 2005, Principal Deputy Assistant Attorney General Steven Bradbury signed three memoranda that relied on information provided by the CIA that was inconsistent with CIA’s operational records. On May 10, 2005, Bradbury signed two memoranda analyzing the statutory prohibition on torture with regard to the CIA’s enhanced interrogation techniques and to the use of the interrogation techniques in combination.
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On May 30, 2005, Bradbury signed another memorandum examining U.S. obligations under the Convention Against Torture.
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The memoranda approved 13 techniques: (1) dietary manipulation, (2) nudity, (3) attention grasp, (4) walling, (5) facial hold, (6) facial slap or insult slap, (7) abdominal slap, (8) cramped confinement, (9) wall standing, (10) stress positions, (11) water dousing, (12) sleep deprivation (more than 48 hours), and (13) the waterboard. The three memoranda relied on numerous CIA representations that, as detailed elsewhere, were incongruent with CIA records, including: (1) the CIA’s enhanced interrogation techniques would be used only when the interrogation team “considers them necessary because a detainee is withholding important, actionable intelligence or there is insufficient time to try other techniques,” (2) the use of the techniques “is discontinued if the detainee is judged to be consistently providing accurate intelligence or if he is no longer believed to have actionable intelligence,” (3) the “use of the techniques usually ends after just a few days when the detainee begins participating,” (4) the interrogation techniques “would not be used on a detainee not reasonably thought to possess important, actionable intelligence that could not be obtained otherwise,” and (5) the interrogation process begins with “an open, non-threatening approach” to discern if the CIA detainee would be cooperative.
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The OLC memoranda also relied on CIA representations regarding specific interrogation techniques that were incongruent with the operational history of the program. For example, the CIA informed the OLC that it maintained a 75 degree minimum room temperature for nude detainees as “a matter of policy,” with a minimum of 68 degrees in the case of technical problems. This information was inconsistent with CIA practice both before and after the CIA’s representations to the OLC.
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The OLC relied on the CIA representation that standing sleep deprivation would be discontinued in the case of significant swelling of the lower extremities (edema), whereas in practice the technique was repeatedly not stopped when edema occurred.
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The OLC also repeated CIA representations that constant light was necessary for security, even though the CIA had subjected detainees to constant darkness.
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Additional CIA representations accepted by the OLC—and found to be inconsistent with CIA practice—related to: (1) the exposure of nude detainees to other detainees and detention facility staff,
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(2) the use of water dousing—specifically the inaccurate representation that the technique did not involve immersion, (3) the use of shackles in standing sleep deprivation, (4) the likelihood of hallucinations during sleep deprivation, (5) the responsibility of medical personnel to intervene when standing sleep deprivation results in hallucinations, and (6) the purpose and the use of diapers on CIA detainees.
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