"Wrongfully Detained"
All those held within the RDI programme were "wrongfully detained", in the sense that their secret detention, and very often their treatment, entailed multiple violations of national and international law. However, the SSCI report identified that some prisoners did not even meet the CIA's own standards for detention under the 17 September 2001 Memorandum of Notification (MON). This MON underpinned the entire programme, and authorised the CIA to "undertake operations designed to capture and detain persons who pose a continuing, serious threat of violence or death to US persons and interests or who are planning terrorist actitivites."
A review of CIA records by the SSCI revealed that 26 of the 119 individuals known to have been held by the CIA (nearly a quarter of the total) did not, according to the CIA itself, "pose a continuing, serious threat". Moreover, this figure does not include those prisoners where there was internal disagreement within the CIA over whether they met the standards for detention, and does not include those determined not to pose a continuting, serious threat after their detention and interrogation.
Use our prisoner search page to search for, and access, the profiles for each of the 26 individuals recorded by the SSCI as having been "wrongfully detained" by the CIA.
