| rdfs:comment | - Despite the euphemism "enhanced interrogation techniques" the International Committee of the Red Cross the United Nations, the Commissioner for Human Rights, the UK House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee, Human Rights First (HRF) and Physicians for Human Rights (PFH),Amnesty International, Elizabeth de la Vega, and many other experts classify them to be torture, and also consider the techniques ineffective. For its use on Canadian citizen Omar Khadr, the government of Canada added the U.S. to a list of countries that employ interrogation methods that amount to torture.
- Enhanced interrogation techniques or alternative set of procedures are terms the George W. Bush administration used for certain torture methods including hypothermia, stress positions and waterboarding. The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the Department of Defense (DoD) employed these methods at Baghram, in black sites or secret prisons, the Guantanamo Bay detention camps, and Abu Ghraib on untold thousands of prisoners after the September 11 attacks, including notably Abu Zubaydah, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, and Mohammed al-Qahtani.
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| abstract | - Despite the euphemism "enhanced interrogation techniques" the International Committee of the Red Cross the United Nations, the Commissioner for Human Rights, the UK House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee, Human Rights First (HRF) and Physicians for Human Rights (PFH),Amnesty International, Elizabeth de la Vega, and many other experts classify them to be torture, and also consider the techniques ineffective. For its use on Canadian citizen Omar Khadr, the government of Canada added the U.S. to a list of countries that employ interrogation methods that amount to torture. Although reactions by the administration and its supporters remain ambiguous, former US president Jimmy Carter is among those who publicly stated it is torture in an interview on October 10 2007, "The United States tortures prisoners in violation of international law." Only a handful of CIA interrogators have had training in the use of enhanced interrogation techniques after U.S. President George W. Bush first authorized them in mid-March 2002.
- Enhanced interrogation techniques or alternative set of procedures are terms the George W. Bush administration used for certain torture methods including hypothermia, stress positions and waterboarding. The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the Department of Defense (DoD) employed these methods at Baghram, in black sites or secret prisons, the Guantanamo Bay detention camps, and Abu Ghraib on untold thousands of prisoners after the September 11 attacks, including notably Abu Zubaydah, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, and Mohammed al-Qahtani. Debates arose over the legality of the techniques—whether or not they had violated U.S. or international law and whether they constitute torture. In 2005 the CIA destroyed many videotapes depicting prisoners being interrogated under torture; an internal justification was that what they showed was so horrific they would be "devastating to the CIA", and that "the heat from destroying is nothing compared to what it would be if the tapes ever got into public domain." The United Nations special rapporteur on torture, Juan Mendez stated that waterboarding is torture — "immoral and illegal," and in 2008, fifty-six House Democrats asked for an independent investigation. A nonpartisan, independent review of interrogation and detention programs in the years after the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks concluded that “it is indisputable that the United States engaged in the practice of torture” and that the nation’s highest officials bore ultimate responsibility for it. American and European officials including former CIA Director Leon Panetta, former CIA officers, a Guantanamo prosecutor, and a military tribunal judge, have called "enhanced interrogation" a euphemism for torture. In 2009 both President Barack Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder stated certain of the techniques are torture, and repudiated their use. They declined to prosecute CIA, DoD, or Bush administration officials who authorized the program, while leaving open the possibility of convening an investigatory "Truth Commission" for what President Obama called a "further accounting."
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