The Senate Torture Report is the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence’s study of the Central Intelligence Agency’s post–September 11 detention and interrogation program, the executive summary of which was published in December 2014. It was the first public disclosure of a number of CIA interrogation techniques — including rectal feeding with hummus, sexual assault with broomsticks, threats with power drills, and sleep deprivation of up to 180 hours — that had not previously been acknowledged by the agency or the U.S. government.[1][2]
Techniques disclosed
The report enumerated the techniques used on detainees at CIA black sites. Among those that had been previously acknowledged: waterboarding. Among those disclosed for the first time:
- Rectal feeding / rectal hydration with pureed hummus
- Sexual abuse using broomsticks
- Threats with buzzing power drills
- Sleep deprivation of up to 180 hours, with the prisoner’s hands shackled above their head[1]
Black sites
The report identified the locations at which the interrogation program had been carried out: Afghanistan, Lithuania, Romania, Poland, Thailand, and at the secret annex of Guantanamo Bay Naval Base known as Strawberry Fields.[1]
Reception within the CIA
A number of the practices disclosed had not been known to most personnel inside the Central Intelligence Agency itself prior to publication of the report. “Even inside the CIA we didn’t know anything about rectal hydration with hummus — no less — with sexual abuse or sexual assault using broomsticks. I mean, people didn’t even talk about those kinds of things in the hallway, so I was absolutely shocked hearing it.”[2]
John Kiriakou — who had refused certification in the enhanced interrogation techniques program in May 2002 and was the only person to have served a federal prison sentence in connection with the program (under the Espionage Act, for an unrelated disclosure) — has subsequently described his reaction to the report as “I feel like I live in the Twilight Zone sometimes.”[3]
Argument for selective prosecution
The unauthorized techniques disclosed by the report — those for which no Department of Justice or presidential authorization existed — are the basis of Kiriakou’s recurring argument for selective prosecution of CIA officers, distinct from any debate about prosecuting officers who applied the formally approved techniques:
What about case officers who took the law into their own hands or who flouted the law and raped prisoners with broomsticks or carried out rectal hydration with hummus? Those were not approved interrogation techniques. Why aren’t those officers being prosecuted? I think at the very least that’s where we should start the prosecutions.[4]
No CIA officer has been prosecuted for any of the techniques disclosed in the report. “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.”[5]