The Senate’s newly released report on CIA torture practices tells a story of two wars, dozens of intelligence officials, an unknown number of detainees and a system of “black sites” and torture techniques used around the world. As various revelations about the US’ post-9/11 torture program have been leaked into the public over the years, a clear cast of characters has emerged.

Officials

George Tenet – director of the CIA 1997-2004

As head of the CIA, Tenet implemented the torture regime, approving specific practices on 23 January 2003. In his own words:

These techniques are, [sic] the attention grasp, walling, the facial hold, the facial slap (insult slap), the abdominal slap, cramped confinement, wall standing, stress positions, sleep deprivation beyond 72 hours, the use of diapers for prolonged periods [ultimately rescinded], the use of harmless insects, the water board, and such techniques as may be specifically approved pursuant to paragraph 4 below.”

George W Bush presents former CIA director George Tenet the presidential medal of freedom. Photograph: Joe Marquette/Joe Marquette/epa/Corbis

Tenet officially approved the torture techniques months after they were used on at least one detainee, Abu Zubaydah. In December 2004, then-president George W Bush awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest prize available to civilians.

John Brennan – CIA director 2013-present

Director of the CIA since 2013, and previously executive assistant to Tenet during the establishment of the torture regime. It remains unknown what, if any, his role in torture was during those years.

John Brennan. Photograph: Saul Loeb/AFP

He has suggested that he was an internal critic of torture but Republican Senators on the intelligence committee have said there is no evidence of that. And he has come under extraordinary criticism from the committee for the CIA’s spying on Senate investigators, a violation for which he had to apologize in July.

John Yoo, Jay Bybee – senior Justice Department attorneys

Yoo and Bybee were Justice Department lawyers who in August 2002 gave formal legal sanction to torture, after earlier giving blessing to the April-May 2002 torture of Abu Zubaydah. They argued that the president’s inherent wartime authority effectively legalized torture short of that which would cause massive organ failure, impairment of bodily function or death.

John Yoo. Photograph: Melissa Golden/Getty

But according to the committee, the CIA misled the Justice Department about how severe the torture regime actually was. Stephen Preston, a CIA lawyer during the Obama administration (now the top Pentagon lawyer), told the Senate armed services committee this in 2013:

My understanding is that DOJ did not always have accurate information about the detention and interrogation program in that the actual conduct of that program was not always consistent with the way the program had been described to DOJ.

Of particular note, I understand that, in a number of instances, enhanced interrogation techniques, specifically waterboarding, were applied substantially more frequently than previously had been described to DOJ. I cannot say what DOJ would or would not have considered material at the time. I can tell you that, if I were in a comparable situation, I would consider information of this nature to be material.”

John Rizzo – former CIA counsel

The CIA’s top lawyer during the establishment of the torture program, Rizzo has described himself as “one of the program’s chief legal architects”. He wrote in his memoir that waterboarding seemed like “a plot line out of Edgar Allen Poe”.

Bruce Jessen and James Mitchell – psychologists and CIA advisers

Two controversial psychologists with experience in the military’s SERE program (Survival Evasion Resistance Escape), Jessen and Mitchell advised the CIA in late 2001 to reverse-engineer techniques taught to members of the US military for withstanding torture in order to use them on detainees.

During the April-May 2002 torture of Abu Zubaydah, their test case, Mitchell would reportedly write to the CIA Counterterrorism Center (CTC) “nearly every day” to specifically request permission to employ torture techniques.

Alberto Gonzales – White House counsel

Then the White House counsel (he would go on to become US attorney general), Gonzales provided permission for the techniques in a channel that circumvented the Justice Department. As White House counsel Gonzales acted as the president’s attorney, with no power to legally sanction any policy of any government official.

Condoleezza Rice – national security adviser

Condoleezza Rice. Photograph: Marc Bryan-Brown/WireImage

In July 2002, the month before Yoo and Bybee provided formal legal blessing from the Justice Department, Rice gave permission to the CIA to waterboard Abu Zubaydah. Later, when she was secretary of state, Rice engaged as her counselor Phil Zelikow, who argued the use of torture was a war crime.

Cofer Black – CIA counter-terrorism chief

Black was the head of the CIA Counterterrorist Center on 9/11 and when the torture program was incubated for testing on Abu Zubaydah. Black gained a degree of notoriety in 2002 for telling Congress that after 9/11 “the gloves come off”. He shrugged off criticism of the torture program in 2008: “I’m not a big fan of interrogations, but you know, life’s tough and there are no easy answers. The American people have to decide if they want interrogations done or not.”

Jose Rodriguez – CIA counter-terrorism chief

Black’s successor as head of the CIA Counterterrorist Center and later deputy director of operations. Rodriguez destroyed approximately 100 videotapes of interrogations – even using machine tools to do so. His actions, which he maintains were entirely his own and not prompted by any orders, prompted the Senate torture inquiry.

The torturers

Names are unknown except for that of David Passaro, a CIA contractor who was convicted in the beating death of an Afghan detainee, Ahmed Wali, at a black site near Kabul called the “Salt Pit”.

The tortured detainees

Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. Photograph: EPA

Khalid Sheikh Mohammed

The self-confessed architect of the 9/11 plot, Mohammed was arrested in March 2003 in Pakistan. While he was in CIA custody he was waterboarded 183 times in one month.



In 2008, then CIA director Michael Hayden admitted the waterboarding and told Congress: “there was the belief that additional catastrophic attacks against the homeland were inevitable. And we had limited knowledge about al-Qaida and its workings. Those two realities have changed.”

Held at sites in Poland and Romania while in CIA custody, Mohammed is currently at Guantánamo Bay. He is among five detainees charged by a US military tribunal in relation to the 9/11 plot.

Abu Zubaydah. Photograph: AP

Abu Zubaydah

A Saudi Arabian who at some point before his capture suffered a form of “cognitive impairment” from a head injury, Zubaydah was arrested in Pakistan in March 2002. He is accused of acting as a senior lieutenant in al-Qaida.

Zubaydah was the first person tortured by the CIA, and waterboarded at least 83 times. He has been held at Guantánamo Bay for more than eight years. The most recent photo of him shows an eye-patch over his left eye, which he was not wearing when he was arrested.

Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri

A Saudi Arabian charged in a military commission for planning the bombing of the USS Cole in 2000. He spent years in CIA black sites.

Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri. Photograph: AP/ABC

The CIA has previously admitted to having waterboarded al-Nashiri. Interrogators also revved a power drill by his temple, fired a pistol near his head, removed his clothing and threatened to sexually assault his mother, according to legal proceedings reported about his case. He is in custody at Guantánamo Bay and has been charged with war crimes.



Ibn Shaikh al-Libi

Born Ali Mohamed Abdul Aziz al-Fakheri, he was arrested in Afghanistan in 2001. Al-Libi was then rendered by the CIA to Egypt, where interrogators performed a “mock burial” and other techniques that provided them the bogus allegation that Saddam Hussein’s Iraq gave chemical and biological weapons training to al-Qaida. Then-Secretary of State Colin Powell repeated this allegation in his February 2003 speech to the UN to justify US action in Iraq.

Al-Libi died in a Libyan prison in 2009, shortly after a team from Human Rights Watch interviewed him there.

Other residents of CIA black sites and Guantánamo’s secret Camp 7

Ammar al-Baluchi

Ammar Al-Baluchi. Photograph: AP

Born Ali Abdul Aziz Ali, he is the nephew of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. He was arrested in 2003 and held at the “Salt Pit” black site near Kabul, Afghanistan, before being transferred to Guantánamo Bay in 2006.



He is accused of sending money to the 9/11 hijackers and helping them with logistics in the US. “He taught them about everyday aspects of life in the west,” the 9/11 Commission found, “such as purchasing clothes and ordering food.”



Al-Baluchi is believed to have been tortured at a black site.

Majid Khan

A legal resident of the US detained in Pakistan in March 2003, the CIA transferred him from a secret prison to Guantánamo Bay in 2006. Khan pleaded guilty to war crimes, including murder, before a 2012 US military tribunal. In exchange for leniency, Khan has agreed to testify against Mohammed and his co-conspirators in the forthcoming 9/11 military tribunal.

Ramzi Bin al-Shibh

Arrested after a gunfight with Pakistani and CIA forces in September 2002, al-Shibh was detained in black sites for years before arriving at Guantánamo Bay. He is one of Mohammed’s accused 9/11 co-conspirators.

Abu Faraj al-Libi. Photograph: AP

Abu Faraj al-Libi

A Libyan whose real name is thought to be Mustafa Faraj Muhammad Muhammad Masud al-Jadid al-Uzaybi, he is accused of being an “official messenger” for Osama bin Laden and of orchestrating a 2006 plot to bomb an airplane. Al-Libi was arrested in May 2005 and was one of the last “high value” detainees sent into the black site prison system. He is currently in custody at Guantánamo Bay.

The CIA used “enhanced interrogation” techniques – it’s not clear which – to question him; officials have claimed those interrogations provided clues about bin Laden’s courier system, leading to the raid in which bin Laden was killed.