The cold cell is a Central Intelligence Agency interrogation technique that was applied at agency black sites despite never having been authorized by the U.S. Department of Justice or the President. Kiriakou has called it worse than waterboarding, and has described it, across dozens of interviews, in essentially identical terms.[1][2]
Procedure
The detainee is stripped naked and chained to an eyebolt fixed to the ceiling, in a position from which they cannot sit down, kneel, lie down, or otherwise relieve their stance. The cell temperature is reduced to 50°F (10°C). Every hour, a CIA officer enters the cell and douses the detainee with a bucket of ice water.[1][3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11]
Fatalities
We murdered two prisoners with that technique. That was never approved as a technique.[1]
Kiriakou has given the death toll inconsistently across interviews. In several tellings he specifies exactly two prisoners killed by hypothermia, adding in one account that the body was simply buried behind the building;[1][4][3] in others he says the technique killed “multiple prisoners,” killed people “more than once,” or killed “another prisoner” in addition to a prior death — without ever giving an exact count above two.[9][12][10][5]
Authorization status
The cold cell was not among the techniques authorized by the U.S. Department of Justice’s Office of Legal Counsel under the formal enhanced interrogation program, and Kiriakou says it was used nonetheless.[1][13] It belongs to the category of techniques applied by individual CIA officers outside the program’s formal legal cover.
No CIA officer has been criminally prosecuted for any of the cold-cell deaths.[14][12]