Baring what he called a “dark and painful chapter in our history,” President Barack Obama on Thursday released previously secret Justice Department memos that provided graphic guidance to the CIA on how far agents could go in using coercive methods to extract information from terrorism suspects.
At the same time, Obama assured CIA employees and other U.S. counterterrorism officials that they would be protected from prosecution for their roles in running a network of secret prisons set up in the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks.
“This is a time for reflection, not retribution,” Obama said, explaining his decision to release the documents.
The memos not only catalog the methods that the CIA was authorized to use — including slapping prisoners’ faces and stuffing them into small boxes — but spell out in detail how such methods were to be administered.
Prisoners could be:
*Deprived of sleep for as long as 180 hours.
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*Shoved against a wall “thirty times consecutively.”
*Put in a confined box into which insects could be introduced, as long as it was “a harmless insect,” such as a caterpillar, and he was told the sting would not be fatal or cause severe pain.
*Forced to undergo a method known as waterboarding — an interrogation technique that makes a prisoner believe he is in imminent danger of drowning — as many as six times within a two-hour stretch.
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