CIA declassifies files on detention and interrogation program [torture of non-whites program]

[JURIST]

The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) [official website] on Tuesday declassified [press release] 50 documents related to its detention and Interrogation program pursuant to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) [text] request. This several hundred-page release [FOIA archive] covers internal CIA documents as well as other documents that were cited in the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence [official website] report on the program. The files expose details [NYT report] about the agency's treatment of terrorism suspects after the 9/11 attacks. One account included a detailed internal investigation in the interrogation and death of Gul Rahman, a militant suspected of ties to al Qaeda, who died at a CIA prison in Afghanistan in 2002 after being doused with water and chained to a concrete floor as temperatures dropped below freezing. The files also include detailed descriptions of the inner workings of the CIA's "black site" prisons, messages from field officers who expressed misgivings about the treatment of detainees, secret memos objecting to medical treatments later condemned as torture, and mistaken arrests of innocent civilians and subsequently attempted cover-ups. The documents also include memos filed by senior CIA officials defending the interrogation program as saving thousands of lives. The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) [advocacy website], which filed the request for the documents, stated that these documents "under­score the cruelty of the methods used in its secret, overseas black sites." [MORE]