REVEALED: There Were Two CIA Torture Programs

“CIA Extraordinary Rendition and Detention Program — countries involved in the Program,” according to the Open Society Foundation. Originally posted here, reproduced by terms of license, Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported

A major aspect of the CIA’s detention and interrogation operations has been purposefully hidden from view, primarily due to secrecy guidelines that make it illegal for anyone “read into” the program to reveal even its very existence.

Recent declassified documents make clear that there was not one, but two CIA torture programs. These programs used different interrogation techniques, responded to different bureaucracies within the CIA, and had very different levels of oversight.

This article reveals for the first time a crucial untold aspect of the story behind the construction and development of the CIA’s torture programs, such as we can understand them today (December 2018).

I will try to retell the history of the CIA’s interrogation and detention programs with this new understanding of how they originated, were constructed, and how they operated. This revisionist history is open source document-based, and it’s worth noting that there is much disinformation and obscure history to clarify.

At the close of this article, we will look at some possible reasons for the separation of the two programs, and the meaning of all this for current investigators and concerned citizens.

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