Enhanced interrogation techniques

"Enhanced interrogation techniques" or "enhanced interrogation" is a euphemism for the U.S. government's program of systematic torture of detainees by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), and various components of the U.S. Armed Forces at black sites around the world, including Bagram, Guantanamo Bay, and Abu Ghraib, authorized by officials of the George W. Bush administration. Methods used included beating, binding in contorted stress positions, hooding, subjection to deafening noise, sleep deprivation to the point of hallucination, deprivation of food, drink, and withholding medical care for wounds, as well as waterboarding, walling, sexual humiliation, subjection to extreme heat or extreme cold, confinement in small coffin-like boxes, and repeated slapping. Several detainees endured medically-unnecessary "rectal rehydration", "rectal fluid resuscitation", and "rectal feeding". In addition to brutalizing detainees, there were threats to their families such as threats to harm children, and threats to sexually abuse or to cut the throat of detainees' mothers.

The number of detainees subjected to these methods has never been authoritatively established, nor how many died as a result of the interrogation regime, though this number is believed to be at least 100. The CIA admits to waterboarding three people implicated in the September 11 attacks: Abu Zubaydah, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, and Mohammed al-Qahtani. A Senate Intelligence Committee found photos of a waterboard surrounded by buckets of water at the Salt Pit prison, where the C.I.A. had claimed waterboarding was never used. Former guards and inmates at Guantánamo have said that deaths which the US military called suicides at the time, were in fact homicides under torture. No murder charges have been brought for these or for acknowledged torture related homicides at Abu Ghraib and at Bagram.

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