CIA torture of suspects detailed in newly disclosed government docs
Lawyers ask judges to preserve copy ‘immediately’
When CIA interrogators in a Thailand prison sent a cable to agency headquarters recounting that they had been slamming Abu Zubaydah, a terrorism suspect captured in early 2002, against a wall, they emphasized that they were obeying instructions to prevent his injury, like putting a rolledup towel behind his neck.
“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 newly disclosed documents about the agency’s “enhanced interrogation” program.
From the perspective of Zubaydah — whom interrogators eventually conceded had no additional information — the experience felt far different.
“He kept banging me against the wall,” Zubaydah said in 2008. “Given the intensity of the banging that was strongly hitting my head, I fell down on the floor with each banging . ... And every time I fell he would drag me with the towel which caused bleeding in my neck.”
Batches of newly disclosed documents about the CIA’s 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 newly available primary 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 an urgent 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, Zubaydah and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, the suspected mastermind of the deadly October 2000 attack on the U.S. 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.
On Thursday, the judge overseeing Zubaydah’s habeas corpus case, Emmet G. Sullivan, ordered the government to “immediately” preserve a complete, unredacted copy of the Senate report and deposit it with the court by Feb. 10.
Against that backdrop, the two sets of newly available documents present a vivid contrast in perspectives, as the CIA cables recount in bloodless bureaucratese the infliction of techniques Zubaydah recalled experiencing in harrowing terms.
The newly available files supplement the publicly available record about the torture program, intensifying questions about whether the public will ever see the full fruits of the Senate Intelligence Committee’s investigation — the result of years of combing and contextualizing millions of pages of government documents by committee staff members.
The CIA cables revealed other potentially important new details. For example, detainees at CIA prisons have long claimed that they were injected with unknown drugs against their consent, which had powerful effects on them — something medical experts have denounced as unethical. While previously released documents from 2004 said that CIA prisoners could be sedated as a last resort, a newly released cable describes a different practice.