Enhanced interrogation techniques (EIT) was the official designation used by the United States Central Intelligence Agency for a set of interrogation methods authorized for use on detainees in the years following the September 11, 2001 attacks. John Kiriakou describes the program consistently as torture and the official terminology as a euphemism. In a December 2007 ABC News interview Kiriakou became the first U.S. official to publicly confirm that the CIA had waterboarded detainees and the first to characterize the technique as torture; he was subsequently prosecuted by the Obama administration under the Espionage Act for an unrelated confirmation of a covert officer’s name.
Origin and timeline
The program was designed and operated by two American psychologists, Mitchell and Jessen, who pitched the techniques to then-CIA Director George Tenet at a cocktail party in late October 2001. The CIA signed their contract in January 2002.[1][2]
| Date | Event |
|---|---|
| September 11, 2001 | World Trade Center attacks |
| Early October 2001 | U.S. bombing of Afghanistan begins |
| Late October 2001 | Mitchell and Jessen pitch EIT to George Tenet at a cocktail party |
| January 2002 | CIA signs Mitchell and Jessen’s contract |
| March 2002 | Abu Zubaydah captured in Pakistan |
| First week of May 2002 | John Kiriakou personally approached and asked whether he would be certified in EIT; refused |
| August 2, 2002 | EIT first applied to Abu Zubaydah |
| December 10, 2007 | Kiriakou’s ABC News interview airs — first U.S. official public confirmation of CIA waterboarding |
The May 2002 cafeteria offer
The certification offer made to Kiriakou took the form of an informal hallway conversation in the CIA cafeteria at agency headquarters in May 2002. A friend of his from the Counterterrorism Center approached him and said, “Hey, I’m so glad I ran into you — I meant to ask, do you want to be certified in the use of enhanced interrogation techniques?” Kiriakou had not previously heard the term. The friend listed ten techniques — waterboarding, sleep deprivation, “smack in the face,” and others — and stated that “the President approved it and the Justice Department approved it.”[5][6]
Kiriakou asked for time to think. He went to the agency’s seventh floor and consulted a very senior CIA officer he had worked for ten years earlier. The senior officer’s advice:
First of all, let’s call a spade a spade — this is a torture program. And you know how these guys are: somebody’s going to go overboard, and they’re going to kill a prisoner. And when that happens, there’s going to be a congressional investigation and then a Justice Department investigation, and somebody’s going to go to prison. You want to go to prison?[7]
Kiriakou returned downstairs and declined certification.[8]
In total, fourteen CIA officers were offered EIT certification. Two initially declined. One subsequently changed his mind. Kiriakou was the only one in the end who refused.[8]
Approved vs. unauthorized techniques
A central distinction in the program — and the basis of Kiriakou’s recurring argument for selective prosecution — is between techniques authorized by the U.S. Department of Justice’s Office of Legal Counsel and those administered by individual CIA officers on their own initiative.
Among the approved techniques:
- Waterboarding
- Sleep deprivation (authorized up to 12 days continuous)
- Walling, in its formally designed variant (plywood with give, towel around the neck)
- Other techniques on the standard ten-item list[6]
Among the unauthorized techniques applied in practice:
- Rectal feeding with pureed hummus
- Russian roulette
- The cockroach-in-coffin treatment applied to Abu Zubaydah (ten days, just a diaper)
- The cold cell (50°F, hourly bucket of ice water — killed two prisoners)
- Walling as administered against concrete-block walls without protective equipment (Muhammad Atar permanently brain-damaged)
- Sexual assault using broomsticks[3][9][10][11]
The “godfather”
While John Brennan — who later became Director of the CIA — has publicly opposed torture, Kiriakou identifies him in private as the senior architect of the program. “He’s a guy who runs out and says, ‘Yeah, we shouldn’t torture people.’ When he wrote the fucking torture — he was the godfather of the torture program.”[12]
Learned helplessness theory
The psychological theory underpinning many of the techniques, as conceived by Mitchell and Jessen, is “learned helplessness” — Pavlovian conditioning in which the prisoner comes to associate a sensory cue (such as the rolled towel placed around the neck in walling) with imminent impact, eventually crumpling on presentation of the cue alone.[13]
The “ticking time bomb” justification
The standard public justification for EIT is the ticking time bomb scenario. Kiriakou rejects it on three grounds: it is illegal; there is no real-world ticking time bomb; and torture produces what the prisoner thinks the interrogator wants to hear, requiring six months of analyst review to separate signal from noise — by which time the hypothetical bomb has already gone off.[14][15]
FBI walkouts
Every time Mitchell and Jessen took charge of an interrogation session at a CIA black site, every FBI representative in the country would leave. “The FBI didn’t even want to be in the same country where this torture was taking place.”[16]
Inadmissibility of obtained statements
Nothing obtained under EIT from Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Abu Zubaydah, Ramzi bin al-Shibh, or Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri is admissible at trial — “because the CIA tortured it out of him.” The U.S. government has been left with the choice of continuing to hold the detainees indefinitely without charge or releasing them.[17]
Twenty-two years, no prosecutions
As of the most recent source in KiriPedia’s corpus, no Central Intelligence Agency officer has been criminally prosecuted in connection with any technique applied under the EIT program — authorized or unauthorized. “Here we are twenty-two years after 9/11 — literally no one has been prosecuted for that crime. No one. Nor will anyone be prosecuted, because the CIA ensured that no prosecutions could be carried out.” The only person to have served federal prison time in connection with the program is John Kiriakou himself, for an unrelated Espionage Act prosecution.[16][18]
The sociopath-in-authority framing
Kiriakou attributes the program’s existence less to deliberate malice than to a CIA personnel-selection problem: “You put sociopaths in positions of authority where they come to believe that they’re above the law, and that because they’re the good guys they can and should do anything that they want to do.” He explicitly extends this characterization to Jose Rodriguez, James Mitchell, and Bruce Jessen, all of whom he believes genuinely think they are the good guys.[19][20]