A radical new front for American national security opened with the deadly terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.
Vowing to wage "war on terror", President Bush sent U.S. forces to Afghanistan to oust the Taliban and hunt down Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda loyalists. The war on Iraq followed a year later. Hundreds were detained in the conflicts. Faced with interrogating detainees suspected of terrorist ties, the question arose of permissible techniques. The Bush administration took the fateful decision that the gloves should come off. Internal Justice Department memos disclose official attempts to re-interpret American law, binding international treaties, and the Constitution to permit using torture, itself redefined, on detainees in the war on terror. Americans and the world first became widely aware of America's use of torture in April 2004, when photographs emerged from Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq of prisoners being sexually humiliated, hooded and bound in painful positions, and threatened with dogs. From public statements by military officers, C.I.A. agents, and government officials it later became clear that these practices were not confined to Abu Ghraib. United States military and intelligence officials at Guantanamo Bay prison in Cuba, at Bagram Air Force Base in Afghanistan, and at secret prisons in Eastern Europe, Africa and Asia have used beatings, mock executions, sleep and sensory deprivation, stress positions, sexual humiliation and waterboarding to interrogate detainees. The methods have been approved at the highest levels of the U.S. government, despite their being in violation of American and international law and, in the annual country human rights reports of the U.S. State Department, being publicly denounced when used by other countries.