This report was published on January 9, 2022 by Costs of War, a project at the Watson Institute of International and Public Affairs at Brown University
“We also have to work, though, sort of the dark side, if you will… if we're going to be successful. 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.”
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. 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. And some abuses continue, handing a recruitment card to Islamist armed groups and lowering the bar for treatment of terrorism suspects worldwide.
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. At least 39 of the men were subjected to “waterboarding,” “walling,” “rectal feeding” – a form of rape – and other forms of torture. 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.
As 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. Twenty-seven of those who remain have never been charged. 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.the military commission system created to prosecute suspects at Guantánamo is fundamentally flawed. 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.
Popular culture has often glossed over the cruelty and failures of these measures. 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.
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. 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.
No US government officials have been held accountable for creating, authorizing, or implementing the CIA’s secret detention and torture programs. All but a heavily redacted summary of the landmark 2014 US Senate Intelligence Committee report on the covert CIA program (the “Torture Report”) remains classified. The portions that have been released make clear that the torture was as useless in producing actionable intelligence as it was brutal.Like Presidents Obama and Donald J. Trump before him, President Joseph R. Biden has shown no appetite for releasing the Torture Report, much less criminally investigating the architects of the Rendition, Detention, and Interrogation (RDI) program or other post-September 11 abuses. Biden also opposes allowing the International Criminal Court to include abuses by US nationals in its investigation on grave human rights crimes in Afghanistan.
Abroad, the US has continued abusive practices against terrorism suspects including transferring them to countries that torture, and, in at least some cases, unlawfully detaining them at US-run sites abroad or at sea. Although such US detention-related counterterrorism violations have dramatically decreased, Washington has replaced capture with kill, conducting air strikes – often with armed drones that have killed thousands of civilians, including outside recognized battlefields. Its counterterrorism campaign has spread to 85 countries with scant transparency or oversight.
Meanwhile, some US allies in the fight against armed groups like Al Qaeda, the Islamic State (ISIS), and Boko Haram are carrying out torture and other crimes against terrorism suspects, including children, and detaining them inhumanely and, in many cases, indefinitely. Some allies have executed suspects following flawed trials.
This paper assesses the massive costs of US extraordinary renditions, unlawful detentions, and torture after September 11 – including to the victims and suspects, to US taxpayers, and to US moral authority and counterterrorism efforts worldwide, ultimately jeopardizing universal human rights protections for everyone. It argues that significant counterterrorism reforms, including closing the prison at Guantánamo, strengthening measures to protect civilians from death and harm, increasing transparency and accountability for the crimes the US has committed, and addressing religious and racial biases, are critical steps toward mitigating the damage.
The Taliban’s return to power and the US military withdrawal from Afghanistan in August 2021 will test the US government’s legal rationale for indefinite law-of-war detentions at Guantánamo, as well as the Biden administration’s commitment to adopting a more rights-respecting approach to counterterrorism. Thus far, Biden administration actions raise sobering questions about its commitment to ending the so-called “War on Terror.” Measures of concern that we outline below include the Justice Department’s willingness to side-step critical legal questions on habeas rights for the men held at Guantánamo and to block certain testimony related to CIA torture, and Biden’s apparent intent to continue using lethal force outside recognized war zones with drone strikes and special forces raids euphemistically rebranded as “over the horizon” operations.