No US government officials have been held accountable for creating, authorizing, or implementing the CIA’s secret detention and torture programs. Moreover, although President Barack Obama declared an end to secret detention and torture upon taking office in 2009, cruel and unlawful US counterterrorism practices adopted in response to 9/11 continue to this day, as do their repercussions. Today, even when the US decries unlawful practices abroad, it appears to have lost the moral authority that might compel other countries to curb them.
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For example, the 2012 blockbuster movie Zero Dark Thirty and a 2019 “interrogation” exhibit at the International Spy Museum in Washington, DC – only partially revised after an outcry by human rights activists and lawmakers – trivialized the abuses inflicted on suspects and suggested, erroneously, that the torture worked.
Popular culture has often glossed over the cruelty and failures of these measures. As a result, the five prisoners accused of plotting the 9/11 attacks have yet to be brought to trial, depriving them of due process and the survivors and the families of the nearly 3,000 people who died in the attacks of their right to justice. The military commission system created to prosecute suspects at Guantánamo is fundamentally flawed. Many lack adequate medical care and even access to their medical records, making the prison a living legacy of the rights violations spawned by 9/11. Twenty-seven of those who remain have never been charged.
Īs of January 6, 2022, the US was still detaining 39 of the nearly 800 men and boys it brought to Guantánamo from 2002 to 2008. The US military also held thousands of foreign Muslim security detainees and prisoners-of-war – including some women and boys – at its detention centers abroad including Abu Ghraib in Iraq, Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan, and its naval base at Guantánamo, and also subjected many to physical and psychological abuse. At least 39 of the men were subjected to “waterboarding,” “walling,” “rectal feeding” – a form of rape – and other forms of torture. With the participation of at least 54 governments, the CIA secretly and extrajudicially transferred at least 119 foreign Muslims from one foreign country to another for incommunicado detention and harsh interrogation at various CIA black sites. And some abuses continue, handing a recruitment card to Islamist armed groups and lowering the bar for treatment of terrorism suspects worldwide. Bush swiftly declared a global “War on Terror.” Yet for many people in countries outside the United States, memories of the US government’s brutal treatment of detained Muslims remain potent. Two decades after the attacks of September 11, 2001, and the arrival of the first terrorism suspects at Guantánamo Bay on January 11, 2002, many Americans may not recall details of the systematic abuses carried out by the United States Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and US military against hundreds if not thousands of Muslims detained as part of what President George W. That's the world these folks operate in, and so it's going to be vital for US to use any means at our disposal, basically, to achieve our objective.” “We also have to work, though, sort of the dark side, if you will… if we're going to be successful. This report was published on Januby Costs of War, a project at the Watson Institute of International and Public Affairs at Brown University Summary © 2002 Shane McCoy/Greg Mathieson/Mai/Getty Images Of the 39 who currently remain, 27 have never been charged. The first foreign Muslim men imprisoned by the US military at the detention center at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, in the so-called “global war on terror.” Since January 2002, the US has held nearly 800 men and boys at Guantánamo.