No post-9/11 official government program was hotly debated, or as ultimately reviled, as the CIA’s use of “enhanced interrogation techniques.” The CIA's program engendered a robust moral, empirical and legal debate. Today, it still raises questions about congressional oversight, accountability, international law, and human rights at moments of supreme emergency. The military also struggled with coercive interrogation during the early years of overseas counterterrorism operations. And as it seeks to bring former CIA detainees to trial for war crimes, it continues to deal with the lasting consequences of the CIA's program.
Latest in Interrogation
The letter urging clemency came after Khan last week became the first former prisoner at a black site to give an account of the so-called enhanced interrogation techniques agents used to extract information from terrorism suspects.
Newly declassified information reveals that a 2002 al-Qaeda attack in Israel was thwarted at the last minute. The plot was kept secret for nearly two decades.
Israel is confronting a national scandal over the hospitalization of an alleged terrorist detained by the Israel Security Agency (ISA). On Aug. 23, three Israeli civilians were hiking near a West Bank water spring when a hidden explosive was detonated by remote control. Seventeen-year-old Rina Shnerb was killed instantly, and her father and brother were injured.
Recent legal developments have again brought the interrogation practices of the Israeli Security Agency (ISA) to the fore. As new details emerged about the first-ever criminal investigation against ISA interrogators over gross misconduct during an interrogation, the ISA’s interrogation practices survived another legal challenge at the Israeli Supreme Court.
An Israeli district court issued a lengthy decision last month related to the Duma arson attack, the July 31, 2015, fire-bombing of two Palestinian houses by two young Jewish settlers that burned alive an 18-month-old, fatally injured the baby’s parents, and badly wounded the family’s 4-year-old.
Abdul-Hakim Belhaj and Fatima Boudchar were my clients. Belhaj led a Libyan Islamist group that sought to overthrow Moammar Gadhafi; Boudchar, a Moroccan citizen, is his wife. The CIA abducted them in 2004 with the help of Libya and the United Kingdom. CIA officers roughed them up at a “black site” in Thailand—a year and a half after Gina Haspel, recently confirmed as director of the CIA, had reportedly shut down the Thai site code-named “Cat’s Eye”—and shipped the couple to Gadhafi’s Libya. At the time, Boudchar was heavily pregnant.
On Thursday, the Senate voted to make Gina Haspel the next director of the CIA. I don’t know Haspel myself, but I have no reason to doubt that she is someone with a deep-rooted patriotism and a sense of duty to the officers who work under her. By all accounts, she appears to be a highly effective administrator. Her long career in the CIA makes her well suited to understand the agency and its operations, and having served as acting director, she already knows how to run the CIA day-to-day.
In his Tuesday post in support of Gina Haspel’s nomination to be director of the CIA, Benjamin Wittes wrote about “the insulation that Haspel stands to provide for the agency from a president hostile to the task of intelligence gathering and analysis.” For this and other reasons, Wittes argued, Haspel should be confirmed—even though President Trump has linked her nomination to his “enthusiasm for torture.” He also wrote that “barring revelations about her role” in running a Thailand “black site” at which d
The CIA released a declassified December 2011 memo by Michael Morell, then the deputy director, about Gina Haspel’s involvement in the destruction of detainee interrogation tapes in 2005. President Trump has nominated Haspel, the current deputy director, to serve as CIA director.
The application of special interrogation techniques by the Israel Security Agency (ISA) has generated considerable controversy in Israel since the mid 1980s.