CIA documents offer glimpse inside secret ‘black site’ prisons, where detainees faced brutal treatment

The CIA has released dozens of previously classified documents that expose disturbing new details of the agency’s treatment of terrorism suspects after the September 11, 2001, attacks, including one who died in Afghanistan in 2002 after being doused with water and chained to a concrete floor as temperatures plunged below freezing.

The files released on Tuesday include granular descriptions of the inner workings of the CIA’s so-called “black site” prisons, messages sent to CIA headquarters from field officers who expressed deep misgivings with how detainees were being treated, and secret memos raising objections to the roles played by doctors and psychologists in the administration of treatment later condemned as torture.

But the collection also includes documents that were drafted by senior CIA officials to defend the interrogation programme as it came under growing scrutiny, including a lengthy memo asserting that the use of often brutal methods had saved thousands of civilian lives.

The 50 documents included in the release were all drawn from records turned over to the Senate Intelligence Committee as part of its multi-year probe of the interrogation programme. But while the panel’s 2014 final report includes passages from many of the newly released files, some of the material they contain had not been available to the public until now.

In a press statement, the CIA said it was releasing the files in response to a Freedom of Information Act request. Their contents were first disclosed in a story on the Vice News website by Jason Leopold, a journalist who has filed hundreds of FOIA requests for agency records.

The disclosures do not fundamentally alter the public understanding of a CIA programme that has already been examined in hundreds of news accounts and television documentaries as well as a lengthy executive summary of the full Senate report.