C.I.A. Torture Detailed in
Newly Disclosed Documents
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/19/us/politics/cia-torture.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=first-column-region®ion=top-news&WT.nav=top-news&_r=0
When C.I.A. 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, in a narrative that has now been declassified. “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.”
Batches of newly disclosed documents about the Central
Intelligence Agency’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 C.I.A. 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 C.I.A.’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 G. 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.
Against that backdrop, the two sets of newly available documents
present a vivid contrast in perspectives, as the C.I.A. cables recount in
bloodless bureaucratese the infliction of techniques that Mr. Zubaydah recalled
experiencing in harrowing terms.
For example, when interrogators at a C.I.A. black site prison in
Thailand confined Mr. Zubaydah in a cramped box on Aug. 5, 2002, they observed
to headquarters that he showed “signs of distress,” according to one of the
cables from a group the government declassified as part of a lawsuit against
the psychologists who designed the program. The lawsuit is being brought by
detainees represented by lawyers including from the American Civil Liberties
Union. The A.C.L.U. provided the documents to The New York Times.
Mr. Zubaydah remembered the box experience in more vivid terms.
“I felt I was going to explode from bending my legs and my back and
from being unable to spread them not even for short instants,” he wrote to his
lawyers in 2008, noting that the box was so short and tight he could not sit up
or change positions. “The very strong pain made me scream unconsciously.”
Other C.I.A. cables also clinically recount applying torture methods
like the suffocation technique known as waterboarding. (Previously disclosed
documents and the Senate report executive summary had already discussed Mr.
Zubaydah’s waterboarding in extensive detail, including that he was subjected
to the treatment 83 times in one month.) The contemporaneous cables describe
him crying, but generally use bland descriptions, like: “Water treatment was
applied.”
For Mr. Zubaydah, it felt as if he was “dying.” “They kept pouring
water and concentrating on my nose and my mouth until I really felt I was
drowning and my chest was just about to explode from the lack of oxygen.”
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
post-traumatic stress disorder, a recent New York Times investigation found.
Another group of documents produced in discovery from that lawsuit,
first provided by the A.C.L.U. to The Washington Post, showed that in mid-2003,
about a year after the agency hired the two contract psychologists, James
Mitchell and J. Bruce Jessen, to design a torture regimen for Mr. Zubaydah,
unidentified C.I.A. employees raised sharp questions about their ethics and
competence to judge whether the techniques they had orchestrated were harmful
or effective.
While other documents, including the Senate report summary, have shown
that there were internal concerns about relying so heavily on the two psychologists,
the newly available documents add texture to that history.
For example, a June 2003 message that appears to have been sent by an
official representing a “Renditions and Detainees Group” at the C.I.A., which
had assumed control of Mr. Mitchell’s and Mr. Jessen’s activities, criticized
the psychologists’ “arrogance and narcissism” and “blatant disregard for the
ethics shared by almost all of their colleagues.” But the same message also
recommended that the two psychologists be assigned to develop a code of ethics
and standards for interrogators. “We have identified this as a major gap in our
program,” the official wrote.
A lawyer for the psychologists, Henry F. Schuelke III, declined to
comment.
The newly available files supplement the publicly available historical
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.
Democrats raised fears last month that the incoming administration of
President-elect Donald J. Trump, who has voiced support for the outlawed
interrogation methods detailed in the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence
report, could cause all copies of the document to be “hidden indefinitely, or destroyed.”
In 2015, after Republicans took control of the Senate and the
Intelligence Committee, they asked President Obama to return
all copies of the full report, which former Democratic senators have said
contains “volumes of new information” that were not made public when a 500-page
executive summary was disclosed in 2014.
Mr. Obama did not comply with that request, and in December of last
year, he notified the Senate that he was including a copy of the full,
still-classified report in his presidential records that would be deposited at
the National Archives. But Michel Paradis, a lawyer for Mr. Nashiri, argued
that Mr. Obama’s decision about his presidential records was insufficient,
because Mr. Trump might seek to withdraw the report from the archives and
destroy it.
Last week, in response to a request by Mr. Nashiri’s lawyers to secure
a copy of the full report in the hands of the judiciary, Judge Royce C.
Lamberth of the Federal District Court for the District of Columbia ordered the
Obama administration to provide a copy to the court’s security officer.
(Lawyers for Mr. Zubaydah are separately making the same request.)
But in court filings, the Obama
administration asked Judge Lamberth to reconsider, making two arguments:
Preserving it would interfere with congressional-executive branch relations,
and giving a copy to the court was unnecessary in part because of Mr. Obama’s
archived copy. It also suggested that the executive branch would appeal if the
judge did not change his mind.
On Thursday afternoon, Judge Lamberth refused, saying in a terse, two-page order that the
court was “obliged” to protect Mr. Nashiri’s possible right to access the
report and saying that nothing had changed since he issued the original,
“crystal clear” order. He threatened to hold the executive branch in contempt
if it did not comply, although he did not set a specific deadline.
The C.I.A. cables revealed other potentially important new details.
For example, detainees at C.I.A. prisons have long claimed that they were
injected with unknown drugs against their consent, which had powerful effects
on them — something that medical experts have denounced as unethical. While
previously released documents from 2004 said that C.I.A. prisoners could be
sedated as a last resort, a newly released cable describes a different
practice.
In April 2002, C.I.A. personnel at an interrogation site wrote that
they planned to transport a detainee — apparently Mr. Zubaydah — “in a state of
pharmaceutical unconsciousness to decrease potential security concerns as well
as to maximize the intended effect of disorienting” him. It is unclear from the
documents whether the C.I.A. followed through.
The new information is consistent with the conclusion of the Senate
committee’s torture report that the C.I.A.’s use of enhanced interrogation
techniques was not effective in acquiring intelligence or gaining cooperation
from detainees.
On Aug. 18, 2002, after 15 days during which Mr. Zubaydah was
repeatedly waterboarded, kept for hours in small boxes, pushed into walls and
threatened, the interrogators sent a cable to headquarters stating their
conclusions. The prisoner “has not provided significant actionable info beyond
previously provided details,” they wrote.
