A recently declassified CIA study reveals that the agency had two different programs for the brutal interrogation of suspected terrorists, according to a retired psychologist and author of a book about Guantanamo.
Writing in Medium, Jeffrey Kaye says that the two programs were run by different components within the CIA that had different approaches to interrogation. Citing a 90-page report from the chief of the CIA’s Office of Medical Services (OMS), Kaye says one program was known as Rendition, Detention and Interrogation (RDI).
The RDI program held dozens of so-called High-Value Targets or detainees over the course of its existence. It received, by the account of its own chief medical official, “extraordinary guidance and oversight.” Its overt mission was to gather imminent information of terrorist attacks on the United States. Its other goal appears to have been human subject or prisoner research on the effects of the CIA’s “enhanced interrogation” set of techniques.
The CIA “black site” run by Gina Haspel, now CIA director, was run by the RDI program.
The CIA’s other torture program was known by different names, according to Kaye. It was called the Counterterrorism Detention and Interrogation Activities (CDIA) or the “CTC Program.”
According to the CIA’s Chief at OMS, the non-RDI program had “no written interrogation guidelines… nor was OMS advised of interrogations…. Interrogators… [were] left to their own devices, sometimes improvised.”
The black sites run by the CDIA program included the notorious Salt Pit prison in Afghanistan, and most likely a CIA black site within Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, Kaye says.
The inherent problem of compartmentalized secret operations, conducted without oversight, is that they are beyond control, even of the CIA itself.
Read and download CIA History of Torture and the Office Medical Services here.
Source: REVEALED: There Were Two CIA Torture Programs – Jeffrey Kaye – Medium
