The Strategic Costs of Torture

De: Douglas A. Johnson, Albert Mora, Averell Schmidt

Narrado por: Kevin Stillwell

It has been more than seven years since US President Barack Obama issued Executive Order 13491, banning the US government’s use of torture. Obama’s directive was a powerful rebuke to the Bush administration, which had, in the years after the 9/11 attacks, authorized the CIA and the US military to use “enhanced interrogation techniques” in questioning suspected terrorists. Some detainees were shackled in painful positions, locked in boxes the size of coffins, kept awake for over 100 hours at a time, and forced to inhale water in a process known as water-boarding. Interrogators sometimes went far beyond what Washington had authorized, sodomizing detainees with blunt objects, threatening to sexually abuse their family members, and, on at least one occasion, freezing a suspect to death by chaining him to an ice-cold floor overnight.

"The Strategic Costs of Torture" is from the September/October 2016 issue of Foreign Affairs.

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