Torture described in cables sent by CIA director
WASHINGTON — The torture of a suspected al-Qaida terrorist, including waterboarding, is described in meticulous detail in newlydeclassified cables that CIA Director Gina Haspel sent to agency headquarters in late 2002, when she headed a secret U.S. detention facility in Thailand.
The suspect, Abd alRahim al-Nashiri, was believed to have been involved in planning the USS Cole bombing in Yemen in 2000, and the CIA was convinced that he knew about other attacks being planned.
Nashiri’s treatment during interrogation — forced nudity, shackling, being slammed against walls, being confined in a small box and mock executions, as well as waterboarding — has been previously mentioned in broad terms in official reports, hearings, court cases and news reports.
But many specifics about what happened to Nashiri during his several-week stay at the Thailand facility, while Haspel was briefly in charge, have not been made public. They are contained in 11 cables obtained under the Freedom of Information Act by the National Security Archive, a private research institute, which plans to release them early Friday.
CIA spokesman Timothy L. Barrett said the agency had no comment on the heavily redacted documents or their declassification.
In dry, unemotional reports, the cables graphically describe interrogators’ often violent attempts to glean information about possible future attacks against the United States from Nashiri, as he continued to say he had none.
The interrogators, it later said, “covered subject’s head with the hood and left him on the water board, moaning, shaking.”
Nashiri was one of three detainees in the period after Sept. 11, 2001, who was waterboarded by the CIA; the technique, long considered torture, was deemed lawful by the Justice Department at the time.