High-Value Detainee Interrogation Group | |
---|---|
Active | August 2009 – present [1] (14 years) |
Country | United States |
Agency | Federal Bureau of Investigation Central Intelligence Agency Department of Defense |
Part of | National Security Branch (administrative) |
Abbreviation | HIG |
Commanders | |
Current commander | Lawrence Buckley [2] |
Notable commanders | Eli Miranda [3] George Piro [4] |
The High-Value Detainee Interrogation Group (HIG) is a U.S. three-agency intelligence-gathering entity that brings together intelligence professionals from the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), and the United States Department of Defense (DoD). [6] [7] It is administratively housed within the FBI's National Security Branch. [8]
The HIG was created by President Barack Obama in August 2009 with its charter written in April 2010. [9] [10] It was established to question terrorism suspects soon after their arrests, to quickly obtain information about accomplices and terrorism threats. [10]
The group was to be responsible for interrogations overseas. [11] In January 2010, the Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair said that the group would begin interrogating people in the U.S. as well. [11] The HIG claims to use authorized, lawful, non-coercive techniques and conducts research on the effectiveness of interrogation techniques and provides training for their interrogators, other U.S. Intelligence Community and law enforcement partners and allies abroad. [7]
The HIG is administered by the FBI. [6] The Director of the HIG is an FBI representative with two deputies, one from the DoD and the other from the CIA. [6] The HIG is subject to oversight by the National Security Council, the Department of Justice, and by Congress. [6] [10]
The group's creation stopped a bureaucratic war between the CIA and the FBI over who had responsibility for interrogations. [9] [12]
HIG questioned Faisal Shahzad, a Pakistani-American citizen responsible for the 2010 Times Square car bombing attempt, [10] Boston Marathon bombing suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, [13] and Benghazi terror suspect Ahmed Abu Khattala.
Abu Zubaydah is a Palestinian citizen and alleged terrorist born in Saudi Arabia currently held by the U.S. in the Guantanamo Bay detention camp in Cuba. He is held under the authority of Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Terrorists (AUMF).
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Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani is a Tanzanian conspirator of the al-Qaeda terrorist organization convicted for his role in the bombing of embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. He was indicted in the United States as a participant in the 1998 U.S. embassy bombings. He was on the FBI Most Wanted Terrorists list from its inception in October 2001. In 2004, he was captured and detained by Pakistani forces in a joint operation with the United States, and was held until June 9, 2009, at Guantanamo Bay detention camp; one of 14 Guantanamo detainees who had previously been held at secret locations abroad. According to The Washington Post, Ghailani told military officers he is contrite and claimed to be an exploited victim of al-Qaeda operatives.
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Anwar Nasser Abdulla al-Awlaki was an American-Yemeni Islamic scholar and lecturer who was killed in 2011 in Yemen by a U.S. government drone strike ordered by President Barack Obama. Al-Awlaki became the first U.S. citizen to be targeted and killed by a drone strike from the U.S. government. U.S. government officials argued that Awlaki was a key organizer for the Islamist terrorist group al-Qaeda, and in June 2014, a previously classified memorandum issued by the U.S. Department of Justice was released, justifying al-Awlaki's death as a lawful act of war. Civil liberties advocates have described the incident as "an extrajudicial execution" that breached al-Awlaki's constitutional right to due process, including a trial.
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John Owen Brennan is a former American intelligence officer who served as the Director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) from March 2013 to January 2017. He served as chief counterterrorism advisor to U.S. President Barack Obama, with the title Deputy National Security Advisor for Homeland Security and Counterterrorism, and Assistant to the President. Previously, he advised Obama on foreign policy and intelligence issues during the 2008 election campaign and presidential transition.
"Enhanced interrogation techniques" or "enhanced interrogation" was a program of systematic torture of detainees by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) and various components of the U.S. Armed Forces at remote sites around the world—including Bagram, Guantanamo Bay, Abu Ghraib, and Bucharest—authorized by officials of the George W. Bush administration. Methods used included beating, binding in contorted stress positions, hooding, subjection to deafening noise, sleep disruption, sleep deprivation to the point of hallucination, deprivation of food, drink, and medical care for wounds, as well as waterboarding, walling, sexual humiliation, rape, sexual assault, subjection to extreme heat or extreme cold, and confinement in small coffin-like boxes. A Guantanamo inmate's drawings of some of these tortures, to which he himself was subjected, were published in The New York Times. Some of these techniques fall under the category known as "white room torture". Several detainees endured medically unnecessary "rectal rehydration", "rectal fluid resuscitation", and "rectal feeding". In addition to brutalizing detainees, there were threats to their families such as threats to harm children, and threats to sexually abuse or to cut the throat of detainees' mothers.
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Ali H. Soufan is a Lebanese-American former FBI agent who was involved in a number of high-profile anti-terrorism cases both in the United States and around the world. A 2006 New Yorker article described Soufan as coming closer than anyone to preventing the September 11 attacks and implied that he would have succeeded had the CIA been willing to share information with him. He resigned from the FBI in 2005 after publicly chastising the CIA for not sharing intelligence with him which could have prevented the attacks.
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