VI. End the CIA Detention Program

Over the past seven years, at least 100 prisoners were "disappeared" by the CIA, held in unacknowledged detention in secret overseas facilities, and barred from communicating with anyone beyond their jailers and interrogators. Many of them were held for years in conditions of strict solitary confinement. Bush administration officials have admitted that at least three of these prisoners were subjected to waterboarding (simulated drowning), and a number of former detainees held by the CIA have described being exposed to other forms of torture and abuse. After varying periods of detention and interrogation, the CIA transferred some of these prisoners to military custody at Guantanamo, and others to the custody of governments such as Libya, Syria, and Yemen. The whereabouts of more than two dozen other people who may have been held in CIA custody remain unknown.

Even with safeguards against torture and other ill-treatment, allowing the intelligence services to detain people without charge is a recipe for abuse. President Obama should put a definitive end to the CIA's detention program by taking the following steps:

(1)Repudiate the use of secret detention and coercive interrogation as counterterrorism tactics and permanently discontinue the CIA's detention and interrogation program.

(2)Rescind the classified September 2001 presidential directive that reportedly authorized the CIA to hold and interrogate suspected terrorists.

(4)Revoke Executive Order 13440, issued on July 20, 2007, which purports to determine that the CIA's detention and interrogation program "fully complies" with US obligations under Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions of 1949 as long as the CIA follows certain requirements in carrying out the program.

(3)Disclose the identities, fate, and current whereabouts of all detainees who have been held at facilities operated or controlled by the CIA since 2001.

(4)Disclose the location and current status of all the detention facilities used by the CIA since 2001.

(5)Make public any audio recordings, videotapes, or transcripts that the US government possesses of interrogations of detainees who were held by the CIA.

(6)Sign and press the Senate to ratify the International Convention for the Protection of All Persons from Enforced Disappearance to signal an intention to never again to engage in such practices.