MOSCOW, November 15. /TASS/. The US Department of Justice has found no reasons for banning the CIA from using torture and mind-bending drugs against jailed suspects, Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said on Thursday while speaking about the declassified documents concerning CIA activities.
"The disclosed reports concern the participation of medical experts in the CIA’s special program Detention and Interrogation. They describe the methods used to make members of Al-Qaeda (outlawed in Russia) testify. In 2007, the program was used against 97 terrorist suspects. Most of them were eventually kept at the Guantanamo prison," Zakharova said. "It is noteworthy that the CIA used as a legal excuse for its torture practices the US Department of Justice’s conclusion the term torture can be applied only to certain action causing prolonged moral suffering or creating a threat of imminent death. As a result none of the CIA’s techniques was recognized as torture. An exception was made only for one method of interrogation - mock burial. Eventually it was removed from the list of permissible methods."
"Besides, the Department of Justice found no legal obstacles to using special interrogation methods in CIA jails outside the United States’ national territory," she said.
"As follows from the reports, the interrogation methods were experimental to a certain extent. The US military’s training program Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape was used as the basis. Each combination of interrogation methods was selected according to the prisoners’ individual features so as not to bring the person being interrogated to a state that would make it impossible to obtain reliable information. One cannot but feel terrified at the thought what such a state might be like," Zakharova said.
"The methods used for such purposes were sensory deprivation, deprivation of sleep, the use of artificial irritants creating an impression of coming death, motionless torture, and noise effects," Zakharova said. "Waterboarding was recognized as the most effective means on the basis of numerous experiments. Also, CIA agents used psychological pressure and mind-bending drugs.".