After September 11, 2001, the US government authorized a military offensive against Al-Qaeda, the group that claimed responsibility for the terrorist attacks. During this offensive, the US Central Intelligence Agency’s (CIA) carried out what has been described as a “torture program” to obtain information from detainees believed to have had knowledge of the 9/11 attacks or of the whereabouts of Al-Qaeda leadership. The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence later launched [PDF] an inquiry into the CIA’s interrogation methods in March 2009. The resulting Committee Study released in December 2014, also known as the torture report, concluded that the enhanced interrogation techniques employed by the CIA between 2002 and 2007 were “ineffective.” Concerns about the CIA’s treatment of detainees and how to address this legacy is an ongoing issue.

Suspicion over the CIA’s treatment of detainees started the process that resulted in the publication of the torture report. In 2007, the American Civil Liberties Union filed [PDF] a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) complaint demanding the release of information on CIA tapes which allegedly demonstrated the agency’s self-described “enhanced interrogation techniques.” Though the CIA destroyed these tapes, it was not held in contempt of court. In response, Congress allocated the responsibility for investigating the CIA program to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. The committee spent $40 million on its investigation and production of the torture report. It examined documents and other evidence about alleged abuse and torture undertaken by the CIA to gather intelligence from detainees. The study concluded, among other things, that the CIA misled the president and congress as to the effectiveness of the “enhanced interrogation techniques,” thwarted oversight efforts and that the treatment of detainees was “brutal.”