The Torture Files

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Rules governing the agency aren't just murky. In the darkest corners, few even know what they are. While refusing to talk specifics, ex-CIA officials insist they obeyed the letter of the law. "We were not a bunch of cowboys," says James Pavitt, the recently retired Deputy Director of Operations. But the military will sometimes transfer high-value captives to the CIA for handling. And the CIA, in turn, has been known to outsource some of its most difficult cases to countries where laws are no impediment to torturers. Handing someone over to a nation where torture is common--say, Egypt or Syria--is against international law. It remains impossible to know what rules the CIA is following when it conducts interrogations in "undisclosed locations" outside the U.S. In March 2002, when authorities grabbed Abu Zubaydah in Pakistan, the CIA whisked him to a secret facility outside Bangkok and asked the FBI to send some agents to Thailand to assist in "sweating" him, as it's known in the trade. Leery of that idea, FBI boss Robert Mueller declined and issued a verbal order that any G-men who visited the CIA outpost should read the debriefing reports but stay out of the interrogation room. Abu Zubaydah soon began to sing and, among other things, quickly fingered Khalid Shaikh Mohammed as the mastermind of the 9/11 attacks. --Reported by Brian Bennett, Perry Bacon Jr., Timothy J. Burger, Matthew Cooper, Elaine Shannon and Mark Thompson/Washington and Mitch Frank/New York