The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) of the federal government of the United States has been involved in numerous actions which have been characterized as human rights violations or as contributing to human rights violations. Such actions include the training of paramilitary units and death squads, the maintenance of black sites across the world, and the use of torture.
Training and support
The CIA has been involved in the support and training of military and paramilitary units that defend against enemies of US-backed governments in Latin America. Florencio Caballero, a former Honduran Army interrogator, said that he had been trained by the CIA, which The New York Times confirmed with US and Honduran officials. Much of his account was confirmed by three American officials and two Honduran officials. It may be the fullest account yet given of how army and police units were authorized to organize death squads that seized, interrogated, and killed suspected socialists. He said that while Argentine and Chilean trainers taught the Honduran Army kidnapping and elimination techniques, the CIA explicitly forbade the use of physical torture or assassination.
Caballero described the CIA role as ambiguous. "Caballero said his superior officers ordered him and other members of army intelligence units to conceal their participation in death squads from CIA advisers. He added that he was sent to Houston for six months in 1979 to be trained by CIA instructors in interrogation techniques. "They prepared me in interrogation to end the use of physical torture in Honduras – they taught psychological methods", Caballero said of his American training. "So when we had someone important, we hid him from the Americans, interrogated him ourselves, and then gave him to a death squad to kill."
John R. Stockwell, a CIA officer who left the Agency and became a public critic, said of the CIA field officers: "They do not meet the death squads on the streets where they are actually chopping up people or laying them down on the street and running trucks over their heads. The CIA people in San Salvador meet the police chiefs and the people who run the death squads, and they do liaise with them, they meet them beside the swimming pool of the villas. And it is a sophisticated, civilized kind of relationship. And they talk about their children, who are going to school at UCLA or Harvard and other schools, and they do not talk about the horrors of what is being done. They pretend like it is not true."
Human Rights Watch (HRW) asserted in a 2019 report that the CIA was backing death squads in Afghanistan. The report alleges that CIA-supported Afghan forces committed "summary executions and other grave abuses without accountability" over the course of more than a dozen night raids that took place between 2017 and 2019. The death squads allegedly committed "extrajudicial killings of civilians, forced disappearances of detainees, and attacks on healthcare facilities that treat insurgents," according to Vice's reporting on the contents of the HRW report. According to the same article, "The forces are recruited, equipped, trained, and deployed under the auspices of the CIA to target insurgents from the Taliban, Al Qaeda, and ISIS." The article also states these Afghan forces have the ability to call in US airstrikes, which have resulted in the deaths of civilians, including children, and have occurred in civilian areas, including at weddings, parks, and schools.
The CIA is also accused of human rights violations for supporting the overthrow of democratically elected governments such as in Iran, Chile and Guatemala. When the news of the September 1970 democratic election of socialist Salvador Allende in Chile reached the White House, Secretary of State Henry Kissinger referred to it as the "Autumn of Crises". The CIA led by Richard Helms was directed to "launch covert action with almost no preparation". A subsequent coup in 1973 by the Chilean armed forces with Augusto Pinochet leading the charge was orchestrated and retroactive interviews with participants "indicate a secret link between the Nixon White House and the military coup plotters".
Interrogation techniques
Following the September 11 attacks, the CIA engaged in the torture of detainees at CIA-run black sites and sent detainees to be tortured by friendly governments in a manner contravening both US and international law."Background Paper on CIA's Combined Use of Interrogation Techniques". 30 December 2004. Retrieved 2 January 2010."New CIA Docs Detail Brutal 'Extraordinary Rendition' Process". Huffington Post. 28 August 2009. Retrieved 2 January 2010.Fact sheet: Extraordinary rendition, American Civil Liberties Union. Retrieved 29 March 2007
The existence of black sites was first published by The Washington Post in November 2005 following reports by human rights NGOs. US president George W. Bush acknowledged the existence of secret prisons operated by the CIA during a speech on September 6, 2006.
Administration officials, including Deputy Assistant Attorney General John Yoo, as well as prominent legal scholars such as Alan Dershowitz, publicly defended and justified the use of torture against terrorism suspects.
In May 2018, The European Court of Human Rights ruled that the countries of Romania and Lithuania were involved in torture activities perpetrated by the CIA. The two countries were found to have run "black site" torture rooms and detention facilities therefore committing grave human rights abuses. In Romania, the secret facility was located at Northern Bucharest. In Lithuania, the black site was a guesthouse in the capital city of Vilnius which operated as early as 2002. In December 2014, the US Senate Select Committee on Intelligence filed a report which included torture details involving Saudi Arabian nationals Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri suspected of masterminding the bombing of the US Navy guided-missile destroyer USS Cole in Yemen and Abu Zubaydah, an alleged Al-Qaeda terrorist. The European tribunal said the "two high-value prisoners" were "subjected to maltreatment and arbitrary incarceration at the CIA black site. Hence, the Lithuania and Romanian governments violated the European Convention on Human Rights' ban on torture. Authorities in Lithuania also permitted the transport of Zubaydah to a secret prison in Afghanistan for additional abuse. In a separate decision, the European court learned Romania was knowledgeable of Nashiri's torture by the CIA in its own country.
Along with independent commissions that have condemned the actions of the CIA to use torture as a strategic policy, more recent assessments have shown the unintended consequences of such methods. The late Senator John McCain, for instance, asked a detained senior Al-Qaeda official how they had gained a foothold in Iraq and he replied: "The chaos after the success of the initial invasion and the greatest recruiting tool: Abu Ghraib". Abu Ghraib, the US-run prison in Iraq became a propaganda tool for terrorist organizations. Even al-Zarqawi, the former leader of Al-Qaeda in Iraq, stated that the beheading of American Nicholas Berg came in retaliation for the "abuses at Abu Ghraib". A further and perhaps even more consequential result of the CIA's use of torture to accomplish strategic ends is its proven link in "making it harder to recruit potential Iraqi allies". Such methods are not only deemed human rights violations, but have also shown to be less than ideal in the US's policy objectives.
Torture techniques
The CIA has funded academic research, unwitting in some cases, used to develop methods of torture. Betewen 2002 to 2007, as part of the war on terror, CIA personnel employed so-called "enhanced interrogation techniques", a euphemism for torture. Various officials of the George W. Bush administration argued that "harsh" techniques such as waterboarding were not torture, or that the end objectives of the War against Terror justified those means. There was considerable domestic and international protest against such practices. The United Nations' Special Rapporteur on Torture, HRW, and American legal scholars called for the prosecution of Bush administration officials who ordered torture, or who conspired to provide legal cover for torture, as well as CIA and DOD personnel and contract workers who carried it out.Calls for Prosecution * * *
Torture and harsh imprisonment accusations (as well as documented examples) were not limited to the recent War on Terror. Yuri Nosenko, a Soviet KGB defector, was held in stark conditions of solitary confinement in a clandestine CIA facility in the continental US from 1966 to 1969.
Waterboarding
Waterboarding is a method that gives the subject the sensation of drowning, and may cause permanent damage to the lungs and other parts of the body. Some individuals being waterboarded, who may have had preexisting cardiac or respiratory disease, have died under the method.
The CIA used waterboarding, and other interrogation techniques against three suspected Al-Qaeda members, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Abu Zubaydah and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri.
Finding of War Crimes culpability In 2007, Red Cross investigators concluded in a secret report that the CIA's interrogation methods for high-level Al-Qaeda prisoners constituted torture which could make the Bush administration officials who approved them guilty of war crimes, according to the book Dark Side: The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned Into a War on American Ideals, by Jane Mayer a journalist for The New Yorker.
According to the book, the report of the International Committee of the Red Cross found that the methods used on Abu Zubaydah, the first major Al-Qaeda figure captured by the US, were "categorically" torture, which is illegal under both US law and international conventions to which the US is a party. A copy of the report was given to the CIA in 2007. For example, the book states that Abu Zubaydah was confined in a box "so small he said he had to double up his limbs in the fetal position" and was one of several prisoners to be "slammed against the walls," according to the Red Cross report. The CIA has admitted that Abu Zubaydah and two other prisoners were waterboarded, a practice in which water is poured on the nose and mouth to create the sensation of suffocation and drowning, and an internationally recognized technique of torture.
Training in torture
On January 24, 1997, two CIA manuals were declassified in response to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request filed by the Baltimore Sun in 1994. The first manual, "KUBARK Counterintelligence Interrogation", dated July 1963, is the source of much of the material in the second manual. The second manual, "Human Resource Exploitation Training Manual - 1983", was used in at least seven US training courses conducted in Latin American countries, including Honduras, between 1982 and 1987. Both manuals deal exclusively with interrogation and have an entire chapter devoted to "coercive techniques." These manuals recommend arresting suspects early in the morning by surprise, blindfolding them, and stripping them naked. Interrogation rooms should be windowless, soundproof, dark and without toilets. Suspects should be held incommunicado and should be deprived of any kind of normal routine in eating and sleeping. The manuals describe coercive techniques to be used "to induce psychological regression in the subject by bringing a superior outside force to bear on his will to resist."
While the US manuals contained coercive measures, they did not rise to the level of what is generally defined as torture. Torture was, however, still practiced by multiple US-supported authoritarian South American governments, especially during 1973 to 1983, a period known in Argentina as the Dirty War.