CIA torture detailed in unveiled documents
When CIA interrogators in a Thailand prison sent a cable to agency headquarters recounting that they had been slamming Abu Zubaydah, a captured terrorism suspect, against a wall, they emphasized that they were obeying instructions to take steps to prevent his injury, like putting a rolled-up towel behind his neck, and described the practice in detached terms.
“Subject was walled with the question, ‘What is it that you do not want us to know?’” reported a cable from Aug. 5, 2002, part of a trove of newly disclosed documents about the agency’s now-defunct “enhanced interrogation” program. “Subject continued to deny that he had any information.”
From the perspective of Mr. Zubaydah — whom interrogators eventually conceded had no additional information, contrary to their suspicions at the time — the experience felt far different.
“He kept banging me against the wall,” Mr. Zubaydah told his lawyer in 2008. “Given the intensity of the banging that was strongly hitting my head I fell down on the floor with each banging. I felt for few instants that I was unable to see anything, let alone the short chains that prevented me from standing tall. And every time I fell he would drag me with the towel which caused bleeding in my neck.”
The documents about the defunct torture program are providing new details about its practices of slamming terrorism suspects into walls, confining them in coffinlike boxes and subjecting them to waterboarding — as well as internal disputes over whether two psychologists who designed the program were competent.
The release of the documents, which include information not discussed in a 500-page executive summary of the Senate Intelligence Committee’s investigation into the CIA torture program that was released in 2014, comes at the same time as a legal battle is unfolding over the potential fate of the still-classified, 6,700-page full version of that report.
Lawyers for two detainees who were subjected to the CIA’s most extreme “enhanced” interrogation techniques, Mr. Zubaydah and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, the suspected mastermind of the deadly October 2000 attack on the American destroyer Cole, are asking federal judges to order the executive branch to deposit a copy of the full report with the judiciary to ensure that the Trump administration and congressional Republicans do not destroy it. But the Obama administration, in its waning hours, is fighting that idea.
On Thursday, the judge overseeing Mr. Zubaydah’s habeas corpus case, Emmet Sullivan, ordered the United States government to “immediately” preserve a complete, unredacted copy of the Senate report and deposit it with the court for secure storage by Feb. 10.
Other CIA cables also clinically recount applying torture methods like the suffocation technique known as waterboarding.
Mr. Zubaydah also described experiencing what he thought were persistent health consequences of his torture, including severe headaches and seizures. Many other detainees experienced lasting harm after harsh treatment in American custody, including posttraumatic stress disorder, a recent New York Times investigation found.
If the lawsuit succeeds, it may encourage other prisoners to pursue claims they were tortured in the U.S. war on terrorism, said Dror Ladin, a lawyer for the plaintiffs with the ACLU. The case marks the first time the 228-year-old Alien Tort Claims Act would be used to fix blame for torture on U.S. citizens, unlike previous cases brought against foreigners, he said.
Senior U.S. District Judge Justin Quackenbush said during a hearing Thursday in Spokane, Wash., that he intends to reject the psychologists’ argument they can’t be sued for detention-related claims made by prisoners who were properly held as enemy combatants. They argued they were acting as agents of the CIA.