On January 19, 2017, federal judges declassified excerpts from the Senate Intelligence Committee’s 6,700-page report on the CIA’s torture program. These excerpts described the recurrent use of such “enhanced” interrogation techniques as sleep deprivation, pharmaceutical injection, confinement in small boxes, and waterboarding, which, in the case of Abu Zubaydah, was inflicted eighty-three times in one month. The report concluded that these torture regimens did not elicit useful information and that some of the psychologists who designed them showed “blatant disregard for the ethics shared by almost all of their colleagues.”
On June 2, 2017, the Trump administration ordered federal agencies to return all copies of the report to the Senate, making it highly unlikely that these copies would be made public and introducing the possibility that they would be destroyed.