Guantanamo Bay Torture: Techniques, Legal Memos, Senate Report

Guantanamo Bay torture refers to a documented program of coercive interrogation and detention practices used on prisoners held at the U.S. naval base in Cuba and at the network of CIA “black sites” that fed into it, beginning in 2002. The techniques were formally authorized by the Justice Department, applied to roughly 780 men over more than two decades, and later found by the U.S. Senate, the International Committee of the Red Cross, the United Nations, and multiple courts to constitute torture or cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment. As of mid-2025, 15 men remain at the facility, most never convicted of a crime.¹

What the Techniques Actually Were

In July 2002, Attorney General John Ashcroft approved eleven “enhanced interrogation techniques” for CIA use. They included waterboarding, stress positions, sleep deprivation, cramped confinement, wall standing, facial slaps, and the use of insects placed in confinement boxes.²

In practice, the methods went further than the paperwork described. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was waterboarded 183 times and subjected to sleep deprivation lasting up to 180 hours. Detainees were confined in coffin-sized boxes for days at a time, slammed into concrete walls, held nude for weeks or months, and subjected to what the CIA termed “rectal rehydration” and “rectal feeding,” procedures the Senate later found had no medical necessity.³²

At Guantanamo itself, detainees reported being shackled in painful crouching positions chained to floor rings for hours, blasted with freezing air conditioning, subjected to strobe lights and deafening music, denied access to bathrooms, threatened with death and sexual violence, and told their families would be harmed. Religious and cultural humiliation was routine: detainees reported that guards placed the Quran on coffee cups, read it with feet propped on a table, and left pornographic images on the floor of cells. A formal “rewards and penalties” system institutionalized in 2003 stripped uncooperative detainees of blankets, toothpaste, and recreation time, or placed them in solitary confinement.⁴

The Legal Memos That Authorized It

The program rested on two classified opinions issued August 1, 2002, by the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel. One advanced a broad “necessity defense” for interrogation methods that might otherwise violate criminal prohibitions against torture. The second specifically authorized ten coercive techniques for use on Abu Zubaydah, the CIA’s first “high-value” detainee.⁵ The memos argued the approved techniques were not “cruel, inhuman or degrading” under international law and required a physician or psychologist to be present who could halt sessions. Later OLC memoranda in 2005 and 2007 reaffirmed the position, relying on CIA representations about safety and effectiveness the Senate would later find inaccurate.⁶

Efforts to end the program through Congress stalled. In 2008, lawmakers passed a bill to restrict the CIA to Army Field Manual techniques. President George W. Bush vetoed it on March 8, 2008. The formal end came in January 2009, when President Barack Obama signed Executive Order 13491, prohibiting the CIA from holding detainees except on a short-term, transitory basis and limiting all interrogations to Army Field Manual methods.⁵ Obama released the memos publicly in April 2009 but said officials who had relied on Justice Department guidance “in good faith” would not be prosecuted. Attorney General Eric Holder investigated CIA interrogation practices and concluded in 2012 that the evidence was insufficient to sustain a conviction.⁶

What the 2014 Senate Report Found

In December 2014, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence released the executive summary of its six-year, 6,700-page study of the CIA program. Its central finding was blunt: the techniques “were not an effective means of acquiring intelligence or gaining cooperation from detainees.”³

The committee examined twenty prominent counterterrorism successes the CIA had attributed to the program and found the agency’s claims “wrong in fundamental respects.” In case after case, the intelligence cited had either been obtained before harsh methods were applied or was available from other sources. Detainees fabricated information under duress. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, despite being waterboarded 183 times, continued to produce significant fabricated intelligence.⁷

The report also found the CIA had systematically misled Congress, the White House, and the Justice Department about how the program was run and what it produced, and that the agency had coordinated the release of inaccurate information to the media to shape public opinion. At least 119 individuals were detained by the CIA, and at least 26 of them were held wrongfully, failing to meet the legal standard set in the September 2001 authorization.³

Individual Accounts

Abu Zubaydah, born Zayn al-Abidin Muhammad Husayn, was captured in Faisalabad, Pakistan, on March 28, 2002, and became the first person subjected to the enhanced interrogation program. He was held in black sites across Thailand, Poland, Morocco, Lithuania, and Afghanistan for 1,619 days before being transferred to Guantanamo on September 5, 2006.⁸ In August 2002 alone, CIA records show he was waterboarded at least 83 times, often with “large volumes of water” exceeding what had been authorized. He was confined in a coffin-sized box and a smaller one measuring roughly 21 inches wide, slammed into walls, stripped, subjected to white noise, and deprived of sleep. He later reported he believed he was going to die during waterboarding and lost control of his body. He also lost his left eye in captivity; officials said it became infected and was surgically removed.⁹

From his Guantanamo cell, Zubaydah produced 40 drawings from memory showing his treatment. The images depict waterboarding, box confinement, walling, forced nudity, and what he called “the Vortex,” a rotating combination of sleep deprivation, temperature extremes, and beatings applied around the clock for weeks. Initial U.S. claims that he was a top al-Qaeda operative were later conceded to be false; he was not a member of the group. He remains at Guantanamo without charge. In April 2023, a UN working group on arbitrary detention called for his immediate release and said his continued detention may constitute a “crime against humanity.”¹⁰ The CIA produced 92 videotapes of Zubaydah’s interrogations, including 12 documenting enhanced techniques, and destroyed all of them in November 2005. That destruction prompted the Senate Intelligence Committee to vote 14 to 1 in March 2009 to launch the study that became the 2014 report.⁸

Mohamedou Ould Slahi, a Mauritanian national, was rendered by the United States to Jordan in 2001, held and interrogated there for eight months, moved to Bagram Air Force Base, and arrived at Guantanamo in August 2002. He was one of two “Special Projects” detainees whose treatment was personally approved by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. The abuse included beatings, extreme isolation, sleep deprivation, frigid temperatures, shackling in stress positions, threats against himself and his mother, sexual humiliation, and an entire night of “The Star-Spangled Banner” blasted through a freezing room.¹¹¹² Under this pressure he made false confessions he knew would implicate innocent people. His memoir, Guantánamo Diary, was published in 2015 while he was still in custody. In 2010, a federal judge ordered his release; the government appealed and won. He was cleared by the Periodic Review Board in July 2016 and released to Mauritania that October, after more than 14 years without charge.

Mansoor Adayfi, designated “Detainee 441,” was 18 when he was sold to the CIA by Afghan warlords responding to U.S. bounty flyers offering rewards for “suspicious people.” He was held for more than 14 years without charge before release to Serbia in 2016.¹³ Other documented accounts include Omar Khadr, detained at age 15, who testified to being deprived of sleep, spit on, threatened with rape, and dragged through a mess hall as “a human mop”; Mohammed Jawad, moved between cells 112 times in two weeks under a “frequent flier” sleep deprivation program; and Mohamed Ben Soud, shackled naked while buckets of ice water were poured over him at CIA sites in multiple countries.¹⁴

Deaths in Custody

On June 10, 2006, three detainees died at Guantanamo: Yasser al-Zahrani of Saudi Arabia, Mani al-Utaybi of Saudi Arabia, and Ali Abdullah Ahmed Naser al-Sulami of Yemen. The Naval Criminal Investigative Service classified the deaths as suicides. All three had been held more than four years without charge; al-Utaybi had already been cleared for transfer, and al-Zahrani had been captured at 17. A military official at the time called the deaths “a good PR move to draw attention.” Bodies were returned to families at least five days later with missing organs, and autopsies had been performed without family consent.¹⁵

Gul Rahman, an Afghan citizen held at the CIA’s “COBALT” facility near Kabul, died of hypothermia in November 2002 after being left semi-naked on a bare concrete floor. A CIA autopsy concluded he had been “weakened by cold, hunger, and other forms of cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment.” The United States never informed his family or returned his body; the death was revealed publicly through an Associated Press investigation in 2010. The Justice Department closed its investigation in 2012, citing insufficient evidence.¹⁶

Who Designed and Enabled the Program

Two contract psychologists, James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen, designed the CIA program around the theory of “learned helplessness,” adapting harsh techniques from the military’s Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape (SERE) training. Neither had experience in actual interrogation. Their firm, Mitchell, Jessen & Associates, received an $81 million CIA contract, and each psychologist was paid more than $1 million personally. The government also provided $5 million in indemnity against legal liability.¹⁷¹⁸ By 2005, according to the Senate report, contractors made up 85 percent of the workforce in the CIA’s detention and interrogation unit.³

In October 2015, the ACLU filed Salim v. Mitchell on behalf of two torture survivors and Gul Rahman’s family. The case settled on August 17, 2017, shortly before a scheduled jury trial. Financial terms were confidential, but Mitchell and Jessen acknowledged working with the CIA to develop a program using “specific coercive methods” and expressed regret for the plaintiffs’ suffering, while maintaining they were not responsible for unauthorized abuses committed without their knowledge.¹⁸

Physicians were present during interrogations and played a documented role. During the 2003 waterboarding of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in Poland, a doctor used a mechanical counter to record the number of times water was poured while a guard timed the duration with a stopwatch. Medical personnel conducted rectal cavity searches, performed “rectal rehydration,” and examined detainees for injuries from prolonged shackling.¹⁹ The World Medical Association’s Declaration of Malta states that forcible feeding “is never ethically acceptable” and that feeding with force is “a form of inhuman and degrading treatment.” The American Medical Association and Physicians for Human Rights took the same position. In July 2014, a U.S. Navy medical officer refused to participate in force-feeding hunger-striking detainees and was reassigned.²⁰

What Outside Bodies Concluded

The International Committee of the Red Cross began visiting Guantanamo on January 18, 2002, and has conducted well over 100 visits since.²¹ A confidential February 2007 ICRC report, later leaked, detailed the treatment of 14 “high-value detainees” held in CIA custody before their September 2006 transfer to Guantanamo. It concluded the techniques used, singly or in combination, amounted to “torture and/or cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment,” documenting waterboarding, prolonged stress standing while shackled naked for months, box confinement, sustained nudity, beatings, sleep deprivation, and cold-water immersion. It also noted medical personnel were present during waterboarding sessions.²²

The UN Special Rapporteur on torture classified indefinite detention itself as causing “serious mental pain and suffering” that may constitute torture, and described force-feeding as a “painful and humiliating procedure” that can amount to the same. The Special Rapporteur cited violations of Article 7 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and Articles 1 and 16 of the Convention Against Torture.²³ In June 2023, Fionnuala Ní Aoláin became the first independent UN investigator granted access to the facility. She concluded conditions there were “cruel, inhuman and degrading” under international law, citing large deficits in healthcare, routine shackling, and the practice of referring to prisoners by numbers rather than names. She described the remaining population as aging, vulnerable, and universally survivors of torture, and said the U.S. government’s use of torture had been the “single largest barrier” to providing justice for the victims of the September 11 attacks.²⁴

European countries that hosted CIA black sites have faced legal consequences. On July 24, 2014, the European Court of Human Rights found Poland complicit in the secret detention and torture program in Husayn (Abu Zubaydah) v. Poland and Al Nashiri v. Poland, holding that Poland had facilitated a secret CIA prison at Stare Kiejkuty from 2002 to 2005 and failed to investigate torture allegations.²⁵ On May 31, 2018, the court ruled against Lithuania and Romania in Abu Zubaydah v. Lithuania and Al-Nashiri v. Romania, awarding 100,000 euros to each detainee. In the Romanian case, the court also ordered Romania to seek assurances from the United States that al-Nashiri’s trial would not result in the death penalty.²⁶ A further ruling in January 2024, Al-Hawsawi v. Lithuania, extended the findings to another detainee held on Lithuanian territory.²⁷

In March 2022, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in United States v. Husayn (Abu Zubaydah) that the government could invoke the state secrets privilege to block Zubaydah from subpoenaing information about his torture for use in proceedings against Polish officials. In dissent, Justice Neil Gorsuch wrote that “we know already that our government treated Zubaydah brutally — more than 80 waterboarding sessions, hundreds of hours of live burial, and what it calls ‘rectal rehydration.'”²⁸

Torture and the 9/11 Military Commissions

The torture question has dominated the military commission cases against the men accused of planning the September 11 attacks. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and four co-defendants were arraigned in May 2012, and pretrial litigation has run for more than a decade, largely because of disputes over evidence obtained through or tainted by the interrogation program.

In summer 2024, three defendants signed plea agreements with the convening authority that would have imposed life without parole and taken the death penalty off the table. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin revoked the deals on August 2, 2024. A military appeals court upheld the original agreements in December 2024, but the D.C. Circuit ruled in July 2025 that the government could withdraw from them. Defense teams are preparing petitions asking the Supreme Court to review that decision.²⁹

On April 11, 2025, military judge Colonel Matthew McCall issued a 111-page ruling suppressing the 2007 confessions of Ammar al-Baluchi, finding that the statements were “involuntary” because the defendant had been “thoroughly psychologically conditioned through abuse and threats” during his years in CIA custody. McCall found that al-Baluchi had been routinely kept naked and beaten during his first days in agency custody, and that this “campaign of torture and isolation” rendered his later statements to FBI agents inadmissible.³⁰ The government appealed, and the Court of Military Commission Review held oral arguments in February 2026. Al-Baluchi’s proceedings remain on hold pending that decision.²⁹

A similar ruling came in August 2023, when Judge Colonel Lanny Acosta excluded confessions from Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, accused in the 2000 USS Cole bombing, as products of torture. Co-defendant Ramzi bin al-Shibh was declared mentally incompetent to stand trial in September 2023 and severed from the proceedings.³¹ The fifth military judge to preside over the 9/11 case, Air Force Lieutenant Colonel Michael Schrama, took over in December 2025 and has scheduled suppression hearings throughout 2026. No trial date has been set.²⁹

Where Things Stand Today

As of August 2025, 15 men remain at Guantanamo. Three have been cleared for release but await transfer, one of them approved as early as 2010. Seven face charges in the military commission system but have not been tried. Three are held in indefinite law-of-war detention without charge or prospect of trial. Two have been convicted.³² On January 6, 2025, the outgoing Biden administration transferred 11 Yemeni detainees to Oman, the facility’s largest single transfer in years.¹ No U.S. official has been criminally prosecuted for the interrogation program itself.

1
ICCT. Snapshot: Guantanamo Bay
2
PBS Frontline. Torture
3
U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. Committee Study: Findings and Conclusions
4
Human Rights Watch. Guantanamo Bay Backgrounder
5
U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. Committee Study of the CIA’s Detention and Interrogation Program
6
BBC News. Guide to Memos on Torture
7
U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. Committee Study: Executive Summary
8
The Rendition Project. Abu Zubaydah
9
ProPublica. Abu Zubaydah Drawings
10
The Guardian. Abu Zubaydah Drawings
11
ACLU. Mohamedou Slahi Released From Guantanamo
12
The Guardian. Guantanamo Diary Review
13
1A. Guantanamo Bay Detainee
14
University of California, Davis. How US Torture Left Legacy of Damaged Minds
15
Center for Constitutional Rights. Government Conclusions on Guantanamo Deaths
16
Afghanistan Analysts Network. Held Accountable for Torture
17
Physicians for Human Rights. An $81 Million Betrayal of Medical Ethics
18
NPR. Psychologists Behind CIA Enhanced Interrogation Program Settle Detainees’ Lawsuit
19
The New York Times. CIA Black Site Doctors
20
AAAS. Medical Professionals Condemn Force-Feeding at Guantanamo Bay
21
ICRC. ICRC Calls for Transfers of Eligible Guantanamo Detainees
22
National Security Archive. ICRC Report on the Treatment of Fourteen High-Value Detainees
23
OHCHR. Statement of the UN Special Rapporteur on Torture
24
PBS NewsHour. UN Report Criticizes Treatment of Inmates at Guantanamo Bay
25
Amnesty International. Landmark Rulings Expose Poland’s Role in CIA Secret Detention and Torture
26
Human Rights Watch. Lithuania/Romania Ruling Highlights CIA Torture Complicity
27
European Court of Human Rights. Al-Hawsawi v. Lithuania
28
ACLU. Supreme Court Allows US Government to Hide Details of Torture
29
Lawdragon. Fate of 9/11 Torture Ruling in Hands of Military Appeals Judges
30
The New York Times. Sept. 11 Confession Torture Ruling
31
Death Penalty Information Center. Guantanamo
32
The New York Times. Guantanamo Bay Detainees