New cables detail ‘treatment’ at base run by CIA director
WASHINGTON : Newly declassified documents released Friday graphically describe how an accused al-qaida operative was stripped naked, repeatedly slammed against walls, waterboarded and confined in boxes for hours at a covert detention site that CIA Director Gina Haspel briefly oversaw after 9/11.
The harsh treatment of Abd al-rahim al-nashiri at the secret lockup in Thailand has been revealed before, and came under the spotlight during Haspel’s contentious Senate confirmation this spring.
About a dozen new documents, obtained by t he nonprofit National Security Archive, provide more detail.
According to one cable, an interrogator “snarled” at al-nashiri and told him: “You are our prisoner. We are your keepers and it doesn’t get much lower than that.”
Some of the other cables, essentially field reports sent from the base in Thailand to CIA headquarters, describe forced nudity replaced by a “towel to wear” and the shaving of al-nashiri’s head and beard while he “cried and grimaced theatrically.”
Haspel’s name and those of other CIA employees who worked at the detention site are redacted from the documents, but public statements and other declassified papers, including the 2004 CIA Inspector General’s report, confirm that she was overseeing the site while al-nashiri was there during the last few months of 2002.