Exclusive: The CIA Chief of Interrogations Who Taught People to Torture (Revised and Updated)
Charlie Wise, the CIA's first chief of interrogations, learned the wrong lessons from the agency's dirty wars in Latin America.
It’s said that every torturer has a signature, a position they rely upon because they believe it works.
Charlie Wise, the CIA’s chief of interrogations in 2002-2003, was not a fan of the “enhanced” techniques like waterboarding that the Bush Justice Department authorized.
Those techniques were cruel enough, but Wise, who died in 2003, preferred the more painful and brutal joint-wrecking torture techniques that were never authorized in the CIA program. The techniques Wise preferred, including the one that got him kicked out of the interrogation program, were used in 16th-century Italian prisons and Vietnam POW camps.
Wise’s work in the CIA is still an official secret. But 20 years later, his name holds a prominent place in the ongoing reckoning of the agency’s abuses in the war on terror. New information about his past and the damage he left behind continues to come to light. (The CIA did not respond to a request for comment.)
In the Sena…