Advanced interrogation techniques

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Under the term Enhanced interrogation techniques , EIT for short, also Enhanced interrogation , in German Extended Interrogation Techniques or Extended Interrogation Methods , the US foreign intelligence service CIA and other US state organs designated certain coercive methods for questioning terror suspects. The George W. Bush administration had authorized the CIA to use the methods as part of the war on terror . It has been widely classified as torture and includes sleep deprivation and waterboarding . In particular, they can also be understood as white torture . The term advanced interrogation methods is commonly understood as a euphemism .

Conception and application

In response to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 , the US Senate passed a few days later the Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Terrorists (AUMF), also to prevent future terrorist attacks against the USA. It endowed President George W. Bush with extensive powers to fight terrorism. On the basis of the law, he also gave the CIA broad authorization to prosecute terrorist suspects. The CIA began with the secret Detention and Interrogation Program (in German: Inhaftierungs- und Interrogation Program ), in which it wanted to receive information from people who had come into US custody as part of the AUMF. As a means of gaining information, the CIA should use the extended interrogation methods, which would be applicable to so-called high-value detainees , ie prisoners with "criminal" knowledge of impending terrorist attacks. As a result, the CIA began to consider the legalization of torture , the use of which is prohibited under US law, among other things.

CIA Director George Tenet dismissed his lawyers and senior officials on to design new, enhanced interrogation techniques, which are harder than the hitherto customary in the CIA standard interrogation techniques ( Standard Interrogation Techniques ). In a draft document, those attorneys wrote that the CIA could justify the use of torture in cases where there was imminent, significant, physical danger to persons and there were no other means of averting the danger. Based on the deliberations of lawyers and officials, Tenet wrote a letter to President Bush in January 2002 asking for the CIA to be exempted from the provisions of the Geneva Conventions , which prohibit the use of torture. The reason he gave was that the application of those conventions would hinder the ability of the CIA to obtain information in an emergency that could save the lives of Americans. In February 2002, Bush signed a decree that suspended the common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions , which prohibits torture, from al-Qaida and Taliban members .

On March 27, 2002, the Palestinian Abu Subaida was arrested on suspicion of terrorism. The fact that he was the highest-ranking al-Qaeda member in US custody at the time contributed significantly to the CIA's efforts to develop an interrogation program. The CIA relied on the expertise of the two Air Force psychologists John Bruce Jessen and James Elmer Mitchell . In 2002 they proposed to the CIA a list of ten coercive methods that were used on prisoners and were to be used in ascending order of severity. In that order, the ten methods consisted of suddenly grabbing the inmate by the collar; hurling him against a flexible wall; to hold his face with both hands; to hit him in the face with the flat of his hand; lock him up in a confined space; to place insects on his body; to leave him standing in front of a wall permanently; to keep him in stressful positions; him to withdraw sleep and it by waterboarding to interrogate.

Jessen and Mitchell took the ten proposed methods from the SERE training program in which they worked as teachers. In the program, military personnel practice interrogation behavior when they are in enemy captivity. The interrogation methods in the program are based on practices used by the People's Republic of China during the Korean War (1950-1953) to extort confessions.

Jessen and Mitchell's suggestions convinced the CIA officials, who sent the list to the Office of Legal Counsil , a division of the US Department of Justice . There, the attorney John Yoo approved the interrogation methods by means of memoranda and reports drafted by him, also known as "torture memos", together with the prosecutor Jay Bybee . The ten "extended interrogation methods" were initially only intended for use on Abu Subaida. He was subjected to all ten methods in 2002. This happened in the Black Site Detention Site Green , a secret prison of the CIA in Thailand , until at least August 23, 2002. The interrogations with the extended methods did not produce any results. In the same month, Bybee agreed the methods with the National Security Council . US Vice President Dick Cheney later confirmed that he had signed it.

Existing laws were reinterpreted with the torture memos. According to a study by the Science and Politics Foundation, the reports interpreted the ban on torture so narrowly that “many of the intended methods were supposedly not included”. They also constructed "legal loopholes [...] that allowed the prohibition of cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment to be circumvented" and immunized "those responsible for the interrogations, from political decision-makers to those responsible, from criminal prosecution" .

In December 2002, US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld approved a list of 15 aggressive interrogation techniques to the task force responsible for the US prison camp at Guantanamo . Jessen and Mitchell also advised the task force before applying for the techniques. The techniques were sometimes referred to as "advanced interrogation methods". Although their use was only approved for Guantanamo, they also spread to US military prisons in Afghanistan and Iraq . Confused about what was allowed in each individual case, the guards used the methods on prisoners and mistreated the inmates in the process. As a result, the Abu Ghraib torture scandal broke out . In the course of this scandal, the first information about the legal opinions from the Ministry of Justice, with which the violent interrogation methods had been declared legal, became public.

The torture methods used, which were not approved, included threats of violence, the use of drugs and sexual assault, as well as rectal hydration and nutrition.

According to the CIA torture report , the "advanced interrogation methods" were used on at least 39 prisoners and provided little information. The CIA would have used waterboarding through March 2003 and the other advanced interrogation techniques through November 8, 2007.

Effect and assessment

The existence of the Detention and Interrogation Program was only made public by President Bush in September 2006. The Bush administration denied the use of torture on prisoners in US custody due to criminal consequences. By contrast, the Obama administration , which took office in January 2009, admitted the use of torture in the past and ruled it out in the future.

In December 2014, the Committee Study of the Central Intelligence Agency's Detention and Interrogation Program , also known as the CIA Torture Report , was published, an investigative report by the US Senate Intelligence Committee that contained previously unpublished information about the CIA 's detention and interrogation program . Among other things, the committee concluded that the use of the CIA's "advanced interrogation methods" was "not an effective means of obtaining accurate information or achieving cooperation with the inmate." The fact that the report was published at all is largely due to the efforts of US Senator Dianne Feinstein and her colleague Daniel J. Jones over several years . The US feature film The Report (2019) also tells the story of this revelation .

The use of torture under the Bush administration sparked a longstanding, controversial, public debate. Some of the recipients expressed the opinion that the torture program had damaged the image of the United States in the world. For example, the US historian Arthur M. Schlesinger said of Bush’s policy on torture that it did more damage to the US’s global reputation than any other position.

A jury made up of linguists suggested the term advanced interrogation methods as the nonsense of the year 2014 in Germany because it had "developed into a dramatically trivializing term technicus " and was used to circumvent the word torture. The expression is a "euphemism intended to legitimize inhuman behavior, namely torture."

The media pointed out the similarity between the term enhanced interrogation and the German term “ Verschärfte Vernehmung ”, which originally comes from the Nazi police language, also describes torture methods and can be translated into the English term.

literature

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Daugherty Miles 2016, pp. 1, 3
  2. ^ A b c d e Joseph Hickman, John Kiriakou : The road to torture: How the CIA's "enhanced interrogation techniques" became legal after 9/11 , in: Salon.com, September 4, 2017 (excerpt from the book The Convenient Terrorist von 2017), accessed March 30, 2020
  3. ↑ Wilson Andrews, Alicia Parlapiano: A History of the CIA's Secret Interrogation Program , in: The New York Times on Dec. 9, 2014, accessed on 21 March 2020
  4. ↑ German translations of the English names of the ten interrogation methods predominantly taken from: Brief of the European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights to the public prosecutor at the Federal Court of Justice Christian Ritscher, dated July 28, 2015, accessed on March 20, 2020, p. 4 f.
  5. ↑ a b c Thimm 2018, p. 15
  6. ↑ Denbeaux 2019, p. 10
  7. ↑ Denbeaux 2019, p. 14 f.
  8. ↑ Thimm 2018, p. 14 (including quotations)
  9. ^ Brendan Fischer, Lisa Graves: International Law and the War on Terror , Brown University , Providence 2011, p. 4
  10. ↑ Thimm 2018, p. 16
  11. ↑ Denbeaux 2019, p. 57
  12. ↑ Report reveals brutal torture methods used by the CIA , in: Zeit online , Dec. 9, 2014, accessed on March 8, 2020
  13. ↑ Daugherty Miles 2016, p. 7, footnote 43
  14. ↑ a b Daugherty Miles 2016, p. 7
  15. ↑ Thimm 2018, p. 18
  16. ↑ Daugherty Miles 2016, p. 13 f., Original quotation from the CIA torture report printed there: "the use of the CIA's enhanced interrogation techniques was not an effective means of obtaining accurate information or gaining detainee cooperation"
  17. ↑ Jane Mayer: The Dark Side , Random House , New York, Toronto 2008, ISBN 978-0-307-45629-8 , p. 8
  18. ↑ Unwort des Jahres 2010 to 2019 , website of Unwort des Jahres , accessed on March 8, 2020
  19. ↑ Andrew Sullivan, “Exacerbated Interview,” in: The Atlantic, May 29, 2007, accessed March 8, 2020