CIA transnational human rights actions

This article deals with those activities of the Central Intelligence Agency that violate human rights.

In 2003, Patricia Derian, who served as Assistant Secretary of State for Human Rights in the Carter Administration wrote, "Through these U.S. military and intelligence agencies the United States government is sending a dangerous and double message. If this continues, it will subvert our entire human rights policy."

In understanding the CIA's role in human rights, there are challenging problems of ethics. , a CIA officer who left the Agency and became a public critic, said of the CIA field officers: "They don't meet the death squads on the streets where they're actually chopping up people or laying them down on the street and running trucks over their heads. The CIA people in San Salvador meet the police chiefs, and the people who run the death squads, and they do liaise with them, they meet them beside the swimming pool of the villas. And it's a sophisticated, civilized kind of relationship. And they talk about their children, who are going to school at UCLA or Harvard and other schools, and they don't talk about the horrors of what's being done. They pretend like it isn't true.".

Florencio Caballero, a former Honduran Army interrogator, said that he had been trained by the Central Intelligence Agency, which the New York Times confirmed with US and Honduran officials. Much of his account was confirmed by three American and two Honduran officials, and may be the fullest given of how army and police units were authorized to organize death squads that seized, interrogated and killed suspected leftists. He said that while Argentine and Chilean trainers taught the Honduran Army kidnapping and elimination techniques, the CIA explicitly forbade the use of physical torture or assassination.

Caballero described the CIA role as ambiguous. "Caballero said his superior officers ordered him and other members of army intelligence units to conceal their participation in death squads from CIA advisers. He added that he was sent to Houston for six months in 1979 to be trained by CIA instructors in interrogation techniques. "They prepared me in interrogation to end the use of physical torture in Honduras - they taught psychological methods", Mr. Caballero said of his American training. "So when we had someone important, we hid him from the Americans, interrogated him ourselves and then gave him to a death squad to kill."

It is widely accepted that the CIA has both directly engaged in the torture of detainees at CIA-run black sites and has sent detainees to be tortured by friendly governments in a manner contravening both US and international law.

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