The Torturer's Dilemma: Analyzing the Logic of Torture for Information

other words, the CIA High Value Detainee (HVD) program should offer us torture at its most precise: if
we find similar issues involved with torture by the CIA as we found in Cuba and Iraq, then we can
conclude with some confidence that these are issues endemic to torture itself.
The rules developed by the CIA for the use of torture are considerably more specific than those
adopted by the Department of Defense under Donald Rumsfeld. Whereas officially the torture methods
used in GTMO and Abu Ghraib were not allowed, even if they were encouraged and their practitioners
shielded from the law by the OLC memo, the CIA developed a strict list of techniques, and the
conditions under which they could be employed. According to CIA documents, detainees could be
subjected to extended periods of sleep deprivation caused by 24 hour fluorescent lighting and near
damage-causing levels of noise as well as induced hypothermia in 41° F water for up to 20 minutes,
containment in cramped boxes for extended periods of time, as well as stress positions for weeks at a
time. (New York Times, 26/08/2009) In all cases, however, the torture was to be accompanied by
careful observation by trained medical and psychological professionals – the purpose of which was of
course not to protect the detainee but to allow the interrogators to push them to the breaking point
without killing their bodies or destroying their minds. 104 The list of techniques appears to have been
developed during the interrogation of the first detainee to fall into the regime, Abu Zubaydah – his
statements to the ICRC imply that the interrogators were still deciding on the limits of what they could
do to him, and applying those lessons to the interrogations to follow. Of the 14 detainee's whose
interrogations are examined by the ICRC, Abu Zubaydah is the only detainee subjected to all of the
techniques listed. (ICRC, 2007; 9)
Information on the HVD program became public after the release in 2008 of a 2004 report by
the CIA's Office of the Inspector General (OIG). Allowable techniques are divided into two categories:
standard techniques, usable at the discretion of CIA agents in the field where getting advance approval
from CIA headquarters is not “feasible”; and “Enhanced Interrogation Techniques” (EITs), usable only
with advance approval. However, non-permissible techniques could be approved by CIA headquarters.
(OIG, p. 29-30) Standard techniques went far beyond the non-coercive techniques, and included sleep
deprivation and the use of diapers “not to exceed 72 hours), isolation and reduced caloric intake (1500
104 The use of medical professionals for torture is a grave breach of both the Geneva Conventions as well as the Nuremberg
Code of 1947 barring experimentation without subject consent. (Guardian, 03/09/2009; New York Times, 07/06/2010)
In addition, the American Medical Association's rules prohibit doctors from acting as health monitors during
interrogation “so that torture may begin or continue.” (Washington Post, 18/04/2009)
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