Enhanced interrogation techniques

"Enhanced interrogation techniques" or "enhanced interrogation" was a program of systematic torture of detainees by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) and various components of the US Armed Forces at remote sites around the world — including Abu Ghraib, Bagram, Guantanamo Bay, Rabat (Temara interrogation centre), Udon Thani (Udorn Royal Thai Air Force Base), Vilnius (in Antaviliai), Bucharest and Stare Kiejkuty — authorized by officials of the George W. Bush administration. Methods used included beating, binding in contorted stress positions, hooding, subjection to deafening noise, sleep disruption, sleep deprivation to the point of hallucination, deprivation of food, drink, and medical care for wounds, waterboarding, walling, sexual humiliation, rape, sexual assault, subjection to extreme heat or extreme cold, and confinement in coffin-like boxes. A Guantanamo inmate's drawings of some of these tortures, to which he was subjected, were published in The New York Times. Some techniques fall under the category of "white room torture". 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, though this number could be as high as 100. The CIA admits to waterboarding three people implicated in the September 11 attacks: Abu Zubaydah, Khalid Sheikh 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 CIA had claimed that waterboarding was never used. Former guards and inmates at Guantánamo have said that deaths which the US military called suicides were in...