Following the 9/11 attacks, the United States government created a network of secret prisons outside its borders to interrogate suspected terrorists without the constraints imposed by international and domestic norms governing prisoners of war.
Some of those who were imprisoned were subjected to extraordinarily brutal interrogations, because CIA officials in Washington believed they were withholding information about future attacks on the United States. As it turned out, some of those who were harshly treated had no such information — the CIA had, in effect, bad intelligence — and others cooperated more usefully when they were being treated well.
A report issued by Senate intelligence committee Democrats on Dec. 9, the most comprehensive look at the program so far, asserts that the intelligence community gleaned little militarily-significant intelligence from the most brutal of these interrogations — which President Obama on Aug. 1 called “torture” — and states that the CIA repeatedly and knowingly exaggerated how valuable they were, by making false statements to the media, to Congress, the White House and the Justice Department.
What follows is a gallery displaying those who played key roles in setting and supporting the CIA's policies and actions, along with highlights from the Senate report's disclosures about their involvement.
Douglas Birch contributed to this report. Layout by Chris Zubak-Skees.
James Pavitt photo by Joe Newman (licensed CC BY-SA 2.0)