Guantanamo: Blacked Out Bay

"We're embarking upon a very dark future" - Terry Colin Holdbrooks Jr.

Almost 800 men have been held at the Guantanamo Bay detention facility since it was established in 2002. Today, fewer than 150 remain. Despite the fact that more than half of current detainees have been cleared for transfer from the base, and in spite of the executive order signed by President Barack Obama in 2009 ordering the closure of the prison within one year, there's no indication it will be shuttered anytime soon.

VICE News traveled to Guantanamo to find out what the hell is going on. After a tightly controlled yet bizarre tour of the facility, we sought out a former detainee in Sarajevo and a former guard in Phoenix to get their unfiltered impressions of what life is like at Gitmo.

Gitmo Detainees Didn't Commit Suicide, They Were Murdered

NCIS Hid Medical Evidence About Guantanamo Suicides

The Senior Medical Officer (SMO) at Guantanamo who attended at least two of three high-profile “suicides” at Guantanamo nearly eight years ago concluded at the time that, contrary to the conclusions of a later government investigation, the detainees did not die by hanging but by “likely asphyxiation” from “obstruction” of the airway. Moreover this SMO found a prisoner he examined and pronounced dead had “cotton clothing material in [his] mouth and upper pharynx.” (See pgs. 5-7 of this PDF to view the SMO’s original findings.)

The finding is consistent with other accounts, and with the theory the three prisoners died from a torture procedure known as “dryboarding,” as researcher Almerindo Ojeda described in an 2011 story at Truthout.

Yet, unaccountably, the SMO was never formally interviewed by the Naval Criminal Investigative Service (NCIS), which had the Department of Defense mandate to investigate the supposed suicides. Furthermore, the SMO’s account was not included in the NCIS final report. This new finding is one of a number of such discoveries detailed in a new investigatory report published last month by The Center for Policy and Research (CPR) at Seton Hall University School of Law.

Thus far, their report has been totally ignored by the press.

Other findings in CPR’s new report either ignored or overlooked in previous investigations include the fact that guards who searched the deceased’s rooms only hours prior to their deaths did “not discover anything that a detainee could hang himself with…. in the manner of the rumors” of their death by hanging.

CPR’s report, “Uncovering the Cover-ups: Death in Camp Delta,” was supervised by Seton Hall law professor (and attorney for some Guantanamo detainees) Mark Denbeaux, and co-written by Charles Church, Ryan K. Gallagher, Adam Kirchner and Joshua Wirtshafter. Joseph Hickman, who was at Guantanamo at the time of the deaths, and who figured so prominently in Scott Horton’s January 2010 Harper’s article, “The Guantanamo Suicides,” acted as lead investigator. A full PDF download of the paper is available at this link.

This article will summarize CPR’s findings, but it is highly recommended that readers study the entire report.

Newly Uncovered Documents

Last month, Scott Horton wrote an article at Harpers Magazine, “The Guantanamo ‘Suicides,” Revisited,” which reproduced and annotated a document that had been suppressed in the Naval Criminal Investigative Service (NCIS) release of documents concerning their investigation into three purported suicides at Guantanamo on June 10, 2006. The document, part of a group of documents associated with a separate Staff Judge Advocate investigation of the deaths, had sat unexamined on a DoD FOIA website for literally years, until both Seton Hall and Scott Horton brought it to the public’s attention. The original can be found on pgs. 15-17 of this PDF.

The explosive document — a sworn statement by Master of Arms Denny called to attend to the suicides that evening — states a number of facts from a witness on the scene that directly contradicts the story promulgated by Guantanamo officials and the NCIS report into the deaths. (Denny was named by Horton, but not described by name in the CPR report.) Horton and CPR describe Denny’s account in some detail, including the fact attempts to revive a still living “suicide” were not made for some time, and that cloth wrapped tightly around his neck was not removed.

Government authorities contend the three prisoners died in an act of simultaneous suicide by hanging, an act JTF Guantanamo Commander Harry Harris described only one day after the deaths as “asymmetrical warfare.” It is this version of what happened that has been accepted by a wide section of the press. Horton’s article surmises that the prisoners may have died at Guantanamo’s “Camp No,” also known as “Penny Lane,” thought to be a special CIA black site at Guantanamo used to coerce prisoners, including through torture, to turn informants for the U.S. government.

CPR’s report goes much farther than Horton’s article in documenting exactly how the government pulled this document — Exhibit 25 of the NCIS report — and replaced it with random pages from elsewhere in the group of documents gathered in the course of the investigation. Detailed in Appendix D of the report, the work is an impressive piece of forensic research.

This deliberate suppression of information contrary to the government’s story should be a matter of public outrage and congressional investigation, but the CPR report also shows how the Obama administration’s Justice Department deliberately misled congressional queries about the report in the wake of the 2010 Harpers report and earlier Seton Hall CPR investigation and report, “Death in Camp Delta” (PDF).

Unfortunately, for reasons that are not clear at present, Horton’s recent article, which drew upon work done by Seton Hall’s (CPR), did not include reference to to a number of other new findings and documents CPR uncovered in their ongoing analysis of the Guantanamo deaths (including the SMO report). The documents describe how important evidence contradicting the official narrative were withheld from the NCIS report. 

Furthermore, when congressional representatives went to the Department of Justice to ask for an investigation, they were lied to about how long the investigation had taken, and whether or not there was evidence that showed something other than death by hanging.

According to the CPR Executive Summary, besides the findings discussed above, the new report concludes:

• Contrary to standard investigative protocol, NCIS never authenticated “suspected suicide notes.”
• Contrary to standard suspected suicide protocol, NCIS never investigated the behavior, state of mind, or emotional condition of the dead men during the minutes, hours, days, and weeks before they died.
• NCIS failed to investigate multiple irregularities in protocol, among them: tampering with the contents of cells where the men were reported to have died, as well as more than fifty discrete events so irregular that they had no specific designation in the log book, and that were so secret that their details were redacted which occurred for hours before the alleged crime scene was secured and investigated by NCIS….
• Contrary to extensive protocol, the Camp Commander ordered the cessation of video recording of the events.

Cover-Up Or “Conspiracy Building”?

The most compelling evidence of a cover-up consists of contemporaneous reports that all three prisoners were found with socks or other cloth material shoved deep into their throats. It was this account of the deaths that Guantanamo authorities moved quickly to cover-up and replace with a story that the detainees had hanged themselves.

According to Horton’s 2010 article, the Joint Detention Group Commander, Michael Bumgarner, gathered camp personnel hours after the deaths and told them “you all know” the prisoners had died from swallowing rags and choking to death, but the press would be told something different: the prisoners had died by hanging themselves.

In May 2011, Alex Koppelman, then writing for Adweek, but currently the News Editor for The Guardian/US, wrote an influential article criticizing Scott Horton for “conspiracy building.” He decried the story about Baumgarner’s speech about “rags” — because Bumgarner denied to him having ever made it. Koppelman’s account was later cited in a government legal brief used to counter a lawsuit by the relatives of two of the Guantanamo “suicides.” I deconstructed Koppelman’s account in a series of articles that examined his arguments in detail.

But the new evidence in Horton’s article and the Seton Hall report demonstrates conclusively that multiple witnesses on the scene, including the Senior Medical Officer, found cloth material inside the deceased’s mouths and throats. This was no “conspiracy building”: the evidence was covered up.

Among many telling details in the new documents, Master of Arms Denny’s account of how one detainee, ISN 093, Yasser Talal al Zahrani, was found alive even two hours after he supposedly hanged himself. Denny witnessed cloth matching a ligature placed around Zahrain’s throat being wrapped around his hands:

I observed a Corpsman wrapping an altered detainee sheet… around the detainee’s right wrist. The other side of the material was bound to the detainee’s left wrist with approximately a foot of cloth in between. The cloth was not on the detainees [sic] wrists when the Camp 1 guards removed the handcuffs a few minutes earlier.

The fact all the “suicides” had their hands bound was supposed to be evidence of collaboration in the “asymmetrical warfare” that was simultaneous suicide. But Denny’s account shows the “evidence” was being fabricated after the supposed suicides themselves.

The Seton Hall report deserves wide exposure and Congress must undertake its own investigation, as it’s evident that DOJ and the Obama administration have no intention of looking further into what happened. But according to Seton Hall’s Executive Director for Communications, Janet LeMonnier, attempts to get attention from multiple attempts at media outreach have garnered “very little interest,” and CPR personnel are frustrated at the lack of response.

Even so, Mark Denbeaux told me in a phone interview that Seton Hall’s investigations are going forward, and another report with even more new revelations is due out early next year.

By Jeff Kaye

US Embraced Foreign Detention & Torture Of Terror Suspects

Changes made to a key FBI interrogation manual highlight the bureau's increasing focus on questioning suspects—including Americans—in overseas prisons.

What happens when an FBI agent steps into a foreign prison to interrogate a US citizen? For several years, even as the FBI has cooperated with foreign governments to question Americans locked up in countries such as Kuwait, South Sudan, andYemen, the Obama administration has been tight-lipped about the rules that govern such interrogations. FBI officials have told Congress that the same rules apply when FBI agents interview suspects at home and overseas. But an internal bureau interrogation manual suggests that the truth is more complicated—and new information from the FBI shows that key edits were made to the manual as the Obama administration shifted away from the Bush-era practice of questioning terrorism suspects at Pentagon- or CIA-run facilities, and toward outsourcing detentions to foreign regimes.

The FBI acknowledges that information it shares with foreign countries sometimes leads to the arrest of people the FBI is interested in, including Americans, and that its agents sometimes interview these suspects. This controversial practice, often called proxy detention, has been denounced by human rights advocates who say it circumvents suspects' constitutional rights. But it took a lawsuit from the ACLU to force the Obama administration to disclose a manual that offers advice to FBI agents conducting these interviews.

When the manual, titled "Cross-Cultural, Rapport-Based Interrogation" was released in 2012, the sections that dealt with proxy detention were heavily redacted. The FBI's page-and-a-half of "recommended practices" for conducting interviews of suspects in foreign custody was entirely redacted:

"Recommended practices" (p. 51)

The section on "recommended practices" for interrogations overseas was entirely redacted. (This redaction continues for the entire next page, too.)

Another section, titled "Conducting Custodial Law Enforcement Interviews Overseas," was also heavily censored:

Annex B Title (p. 47)

Then, in December, I broke the story of a bizarre FBI mistake: In 2010, a top agent at the bureau, thinking (incorrectly) that he could copyright the manual, deposited an unredacted version at the Library of Congress, where anyone could read it. But the tale gets even stranger.

The interrogation manual deposited at the Library of Congress was labeled "Version 3" and dated August 18, 2008, just a few months before President George W. Bush left office. A side-by-side comparison showed that the section dealing with proxy detentions had changed dramatically between this Bush-era version and the 2011 one released to the ACLU.

The Bush-era section focused on interviews in Defense Department facilities in Iraq and Afghanistan—not suspects held by foreign governments. It was titled "Conducting Custodial Law Enforcement Interviews in Combat Zones,"—minus the word "Overseas," with its broader meaning. And the page-and-a-half on "recommended practices" that was entirely redacted in the 2011 version wasn't in this version of the manual at all.

So when were the changes made? Recently, an FBI spokesman got me an answer. He said the tweaks came "around late 2010,"—well into the Obama administration—and "were mainly based on additional experiences gained overseas along with additional research on the subject matter."

Michael German, a former FBI agent who is now a fellow at the Brennan Center for Law and Justice at New York University, says it is "extremely troubling" that it took the ACLU to uncover the manual, and that "these rules seem to expand without notice or public discussion. [It is] clear evidence there are insufficient internal or external controls on the FBI."

In recent years, the Obama administration has continued to shift away from unilateral measures such as drone strikes, and toward working with foreign allies through means like proxy detention. Publicly disclosed funding to train and equip foreign militaries to fight terrorism has increased from $218.6 million in 2012 to a requested $290.2 million in 2014, and defense officials recently told The Hill that the government's secret counterterrorism budget now has less money going to Afghanistan and more going to North Africa and the Middle East. Data collected byLong War Journal show that drone strikes in Pakistan peaked in 2010 and havedeclined every year since; similar data for Yemen show a peak in 2012 and a decline in the years since.

For more on what the FBI's work with American citizens overseas can look like in practice, check out my recent investigation in the May/June issue of Mother Jones.

By Nick Baumann

This Why There Is A Sunni Uprising In Iraq

This is just one of the many violent acts that the Shia are doing to the Sunni's of Iraq on a daily basis.

Revealed: Senate Report Contains New Details On CIA Black Sites

A Senate Intelligence Committee report provides the first official confirmation that the CIA secretly operated a black site prison out of Guantánamo Bay, two U.S. officials who have read portions of the report have told Al Jazeera.The officials — who spoke on condition of anonymity because the 6,600-page report on the CIA’s detention and interrogation program remains classified — said top-secret agency documents reveal that at least 10 high-value targets were secretly held and interrogated at Guantánamo’s Camp Echo at various times from late 2003 to 2004. They were then flown to Rabat, Morocco, before being officially sent to the U.S. military’s detention facility at Guantánamo in September 2006. In September 2006, President George W. Bush formally announced that 14 CIA captives had beentransferred to Guantánamo and would be prosecuted before military tribunals. He then acknowledged for the first time that the CIA had been operating a secret network of prisons overseas to detain and interrogate high-value targets. The Senate report, according to Al Jazeera’s sources, says that the CIA detained some high-value suspects on Diego Garcia, an Indian Ocean island controlled by the United Kingdom and leased to the United States. The classified CIA documents say the black site arrangement at Diego Garcia was made with the “full cooperation” of the British government. That would confirm long-standing claims by human rights investigators and journalists, whose allegations — based on flight logs and unnamed government sources — have routinely been denied by the CIA. The CIA and State Department declined Al Jazeera’s requests for comment. The Intelligence Committee last week voted 11 to 3 to declassify the report’s 480-page executive summaryand 20 conclusions and findings, which incorporate responses from Republican members of the committee and from the CIA. The executive summary will undergo a declassification review, led by the CIA, with input from the State Department and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the U.S. officials said. The panel’s chairwoman, Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein, said in a statement last Thursday that the full 6,600-page report, with 37,000 footnotes, “will be held for declassification at a later time.” Leaked details of the committee’s report have caused waves in countries like Poland, where the CIA is known to have operated a black site prison — which Polish officials continue to deny having known about.The U.S. officials who spoke to Al Jazeera said that the Senate report reveals 20 prisoners were secretly detained in Poland from 2002 to 2005. They added that Polish officials recently sought assurances from diplomats and visiting U.S. officials that the Senate report would conceal details about Poland’s role in allowing the CIA black site to be operated on Polish soil. Al Jazeera’s sources said U.S. officials reassured their Polish counterparts last year that it was almost certain that the declassified version of the report would not identify the countries that cooperated with the CIA’s detention and interrogation program. According to the Senate report, Al Jazeera’s sources said, a majority of the more than 100 detainees held in CIA custody were detained in secret prisons in Afghanistan and Morocco, where they were subject to torture methods not sanctioned by the Justice Department. Those methods are recalled by the report in vivid narratives lifted from daily logs of the detention and interrogation of about 34 high-value prisoners. The report allegedly notes that about 85 detainees deemed low-value passed through the black sites and were later dumped at Guantánamo or handed off to foreign intelligence services.  More than 10 of those handed over to foreign intelligence agencies “to face terrorism charges” are now “unaccounted for” and presumed dead, the U.S. officials said. The Senate report says more than two dozen of these men designated low-value had, in fact, been wrongfully detained and rendered to other countries on the basis of intelligence obtained from CIA captives under torture and from information shared with CIA officials by other governments, both of which turned out to be false. The report allegedly singles out a top CIA official for botching a handful of renditions and outlines agency efforts to cover up the mistakes. The Senate report allegedly accuses “senior CIA officials” of lying during multiple closed-session briefings to members of Congress from 2003 to 2005 about the use of certain “enhanced” interrogation techniques. The report says an agency official lied to Congress in 2005 when he insisted the U.S. was adhering to international treaties barring cruel and degrading treatment of prisoners, the U.S. officials told Al Jazeera. The report not only accuses certain CIA officials of deliberately misleading Congress; Al Jazeera’s sources say it also suggests that the agency sanctioned leaks to selected journalists about phantom plots supposedly disrupted as a result of information gained through the program in order to craft a narrative of success. The Senate report, like a 2009 Senate Armed Services Committee report (PDF), says Air Force psychologists under contract to the CIA reverse-engineered a decades-old resistance-training program taught to U.S. airmen known as survival evasion resistance escape (SERE). According to a SERE training document obtained by Al Jazeera titled “Coercive Exploitation Techniques,” Air Force personnel were taught that communist regimes used “deprivations” of “food, water, sleep and medical care” as well as “the use of threats” in order to weaken a captive’s mental and physical ability to resist interrogation. “Isolation” would be used, according to the SERE program, to deprive the “recipient of all social support” so that he develops a “dependency” on his interrogator. And “physical duress, violence and torture” are used to weaken “mental and physical ability to resist exploitation.” Ironically, perhaps, the SERE document (displayed below) notes that such techniques were used by the Soviet Union, China and North Korea to obtain false confessions. Senate investigators allegedly obtained from the CIA a 2003 “business plan,” written by Air Force psychologists James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen, that contained erroneous details about the positive aspects of the enhanced interrogation program and the veracity of the intelligence its extracted from detainees. The “business plan” states that Al-Qaeda captives were “resistant” to “standard” interrogation techniques, an argument the Senate report found lacked merit because torture techniques were used before they were even questioned. Neither Jessen, who lives in Spokane, Wash., nor Mitchell, who resides in Land o’ Lakes, Fla., responded to phone calls or emails for comment. Both men are featured prominently in the Senate’s report, according to U.S. officials. The ‘Experiment’ According to Al Jazeera’s sources, Zain Abidin Mohammed Husain Abu Zubaydah was the only captive subjected to all 10 torture techniques identified in an August 2002 Justice Department memo. But the U.S. officials said the Senate report concludes that the methods applied to Abu Zubaydah went above and beyond the guidelines outlined in that memo and were used before the memo establishing their legality was written.The Senate report allegedly adopts part of a narrative from former FBI special agent Ali Soufan, who first interrogated Abu Zubaydah at the black site and wrote in his book “The Black Banners” that Mitchell was conducting an “experiment” on Abu Zubaydah. For example, the August 2002 Justice Department legal memo authorized sleep deprivation for Abu Zubaydah for 11 consecutive days, but Mitchell kept him awake far longer, the U.S. officials said, citing classified CIA cables. Abu Zubaydah was stripped naked, strapped into a chair and doused with cold water to keep him awake. He was then interrogated and asked what he knew, at which point, his attorney told Al Jazeera, Abu Zubaydah was “psychotic” and would have admitted to anything. Additionally, the report allegedly says that Abu Zubaydah was stuffed into a pet crate (the type used to transport dogs on airplanes) over the course of two weeks and routinely passed out, was shackled by his wrists to the ceiling of his cell and subjected to an endless loop of loud music. One former interrogator briefed about Abu Zubaydah’s interrogations from May to July 2002 told Al Jazeera that the music used to batter the detainee’s senses was by the Red Hot Chili Peppers. Abu Zubaydah’s attorney, Brent Mickum, hopes the Senate report’s executive summary will vindicate what he has been saying for years. “My client was tortured brutally well before any legal memo was issued,” Mickum said. He expects the report to “show that my client was a nonmember of Al-Qaeda, contrary to all of the earlier reports by the Bush administration. I am also confident that the report will show that, after he was deemed to be compliant while he was held in Thailand, that he continued to be tortured on explicit orders from the Bush administration.” The Senate report, according to Al Jazeera’s sources, says that CIA interrogators were under an enormous pressure from top agency officials, themselves under pressure from the White House, to use “enhanced” interrogation techniques to obtain information from detainees connecting Iraq and Al-Qaeda. One interrogator who worked for the CIA and the U.S. military during Bush’s tenure and participated in the interrogations of two high-value CIA prisoners told Al Jazeera — speaking on condition of anonymity because he is still employed by the U.S. government — that the “enhanced” interrogation program was “nothing more than the Stanford Prison Experiment writ large.” (The 1971 Stanford University study shocked the public by demonstrating how easily people placed in authority over more vulnerable others resorted to cruelty.) “Interrogators were being pressured — You have to get info from these people,’” the interrogator told Al Jazeera. “There was no consideration that the person we were interrogating may not know. That was always seen as a resistance technique. ‘They [the detainees] must be lying!’ There was pressure on us from above to produce what they wanted. Not a single person I worked with knew how to conduct an interrogation or [had] ever conducted an interrogation.” SERE Techniques Reverse Engineered By Jason Leopold

Torturing Abu Zubaydah and The Art Of Deception

A guard watches over detainees at the U.S. military prison in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, in 2009.

J

As a guinea pig for ‘enhanced interrogation,’ Gitmo captive ™had a well-developed technique for misleading interrogators

By Jason Leopold

Zain Abidin Mohammed Husain Abu Zubaydah had endured days of beatings, humiliation and being tied up in a stress position. But his Pakistani-intelligence interrogators were not giving up as they grilled the self-styled jihadi on his role among the Arab volunteers who had gone to Afghanistan to fight the Soviets but were now often suspected of plotting attacks against the West.

Although the CIA had worked with Pakistani and Arab intelligence agencies to support these volunteer networks in the 1980s, the 1993 World Trade Center bombing was the first sign of a dramatic blowback, and Pakistan’s security services were now under pressure from their U.S. allies to crack down on an enterprise they had originally helped nurture.

One officer repeatedly struck Abu Zubaydah, according to the vivid account written in 1995 and 1996 in the fourth volume of his diaries — the U.S. government translation of which has been obtained exclusively by Al Jazeera.

“I want you to talk about your life for the last 10 years,” the officer told his captive. Today one of 14 high-value detainees at Guantanamo Bay, Abu Zubaydah back then was a leading figure in the Arab mujahedeen milieu from which Al-Qaeda emerged.

Leg restraints in an interview room at Camp V, styled after state-of-the-art U.S. federal prisons, at Guantanamo Bay.

Paul J. Richards/AFP/Getty Images

Abu Zubaydah was not going to confess. When asked by his Pakistani tormentors for specific information — by his own account — he gave the impression of suffering greater physical pain than was the case and eventually offered false information in order to stop the abuse.

“Who is your trainer?” the officer asked, referring to the identity of the individual who trained him in weapons at Khaldan camp in Afghanistan.

“My teacher’s name is Mahmud,” Abu Zubaydah replied.

“Mahmud who?”

“Mahmud Al-Milaiji,” he answered, confident that his interrogator would not be aware that this was the name of an Egyptian film star. Abu Zubaydah would repeat the name of the Egyptian actor during a later CIA interrogation session, according to the book “The Black Banners,” written by Ali Soufan, an FBI special agent who was present at the CIA black site where Abu Zubaydah was rendered after his capture.

Abu Zubaydah was found along with his diaries in Pakistan on March 28, 2002, having fled the collapse of the Taliban regime. In the hands of the CIA, he became something of a guinea pig for the George W. Bush administration's interrogation procedures, which many groups, including top human-rights organizations, have labeled as torture. Although Al Jazeera has not seen the three subsequent diary volumes that Abu Zubaydah wrote while in CIA custody, according to his lawyers, they are a chronicle of his torture at the hands of U.S. captors.

On Aug. 1, 2002, five months after Abu Zubaydah’s capture, the U.S. Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel sent the White House a memo drafted by attorney John Yoo and signed by his boss, Assistant Attorney General Jay Bybee. It authorized the interrogation of Abu Zubaydah using 10 techniques, including waterboarding, sleep deprivation, cramped confinement, stress positions, wall slamming and being placed in a confinement box with insects. This last technique was inspired by his diaries, where he had written of his fear of bugs.

Yoo’s memo asserted that Abu Zubaydah had been one of the planners of the 9/11 attacks, the 1998 East Africa embassy bombings and every other major assault carried out by Al-Qaeda — claims later significantly pulled back by U.S. authorities.

On April 27, 2002, Newsweek reported, under the headline “How Good Is Abu Zubaydah’s Information?” that he was the source of information leading to two U.S. domestic terrorism warningspertaining to possible attacks against banks, supermarkets and shopping malls.

'Your jihad is over'

The chronicle of his Pakistan torture experience in his diaries raises the question of whether Abu Zubaydah attempted to confound his American interrogators, too, by concealing information while appearing to be releasing gems of intelligence. Obviously, unlike his Pakistani interrogators in 1995, the CIA may have been using physical duress in conjunction with other more sophisticated methods. Still, the diaries  which could be painting a rosier picture than was the case of his performance under physical assault — suggest that Abu Zubaydah saw interrogation and torture as a contest from which he could emerge with his secrets intact, having fooled his questioners.

Abu Zubaydah had been captured at a Pakistani checkpoint as he drove with another man — a Yemeni from Saudi Arabia — on a journey in a mini-convoy of two vehicles delivering materials to comrades moved to a safe house, the House of Exile in Babi Jadeed, because of a crackdown by Pakistani police and intelligence services. 

They had been looking for Ramzi Yousef, mastermind of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. Before he was caught, Yousef was one of the most notorious residents of the House of Martyrs, the guesthouse Abu Zubaydah ran and “the center of terrorism, as it’s called,” Abu Zubaydah wrote.

He recounted in his diary, “The police stopped us … I didn’t say a word. The police said to me, while pointing at me to come down, in a broken English, as if the Arabs are English speaking, he said, ‘Your Jihad is over.'”

Abu Zubaydah handed the border guard a United Nations refugee card he acquired earlier in the year, but the ploy did not work, and he and his passenger were taken to an office in the nearby Pakistani city of Peshawar. He recounted a frantic attempt to get rid of some seals that he had used to make fake Afghan passports for his comrades:

They decided to search us before being presented to the person in charge, and I was scared that they might discover the faked seals that I was carrying with me, so I said, I need to go to the bathroom (to urinate) but they didn’t allow me before doing a search. But I insisted that I can’t stand it any more, and that I will urinate in my pants. So they had to take me to the bathroom. After I closed the door, and get rid of the plastic seals, and left the wooden parts in the upper window … Then I pulled the flush and all the seals disappeared in the toilet. So I went out cheerfully because I don’t have a problem now.

However, he had forgotten one seal in a pocket, which was soon found. Abu Zubaydah wrote that he tried to portray himself as a “poor oppressed reporter who is calling for democracy and fighting dictatorship.” But the Pakistani officer didn’t believe him. “F--- you don’t try to bluff,” he reportedly said.

Soon the beatings began. Abu Zubaydah was taken downstairs to a prison and waited as a police car packed with Pakistani soldiers arrived. He sat in the backseat, handcuffed. The officer was in the front seat. “They took me around most of the places in the city (at night), and showed me to whomever they encountered, but no one could identify me … So they beat me up in the street and in front of the public while I was tied up. I could only push them back or scream in their faces.”

The Pakistanis were trying to force Abu Zubaydah to identify the location of the House of Martyrs. He was hit using shoes and facial slaps. Then he was taken to the upper floor of a house and thrown to the ground. Two of the men grabbed his feet “while the officer started flogging using a heavy stick.”

Abu Zubaydah wrote that he “turned to deceit” to get the Pakistanis to stop beating him.

“I played a theatrical role; I cried loudly while pointing to my head with my hand, then the beating stopped, and he wanted to check out what happened, so I held his hand and put it on the wound toward the opening.”

In Volume 2 of his diaries, Abu Zubaydah wrote that he suffered a shrapnel wound to his head, which left a small hole in his skull, while performing ablutions on a mountain in Gardez, Afghanistan. He temporarily lost his sight and hearing and the ability to move his body. He also lost part of his memory, the ability to speak and write for about seven months. He wrote in an entry that reading his “memoirs help(ed) me memory (sic) to recall everything.”

At the interrogation, Abu Zubaydah contorted his fingers to make it appear that the beating “will leave me in a state of nervous shock … I opened my right hand keeping two of my fingers twisted, and said, ‘I cannot control them.’” The officer “became more scared, left the room and lighted a cigarette hoping that the smoking will calm down his anger.”

But he returned about 15 minutes later and started beating Abu Zubaydah again.

“I am not going to let you go even if you die, where is the house?” he said.

“I only answered with a few words trying to show that my nervous (sic) had an impact on my tongue … But he started beating me again more forcefully while I was shouting at them in English, ‘you animals!” Abu Zubaydah wrote.

The officer left the room while a soldier continued to beat Abu Zubaydah. He was then taken to a prison at Qura Qabrastan. The officer, Abu Zubaydah wrote in his diary, “ordered that I should be tied up to the high bars so I can’t sit down or sleep during the night, and in fact that was what happened.”

“Hours passed by and I was feeling the pain in the bottom of my foot (The location of the beating). I also felt the pain in the calf, and the thigh, because of standing a long time … And I started to realize their intention, they must be trying to make me reach a nervous breakdown so I will confess with everything I know at the time of interrogation … I relied on my determination and rested against the bars and tried to sleep, and I really slept while standing, and when the pain increased in one foot, I woke up and leaned on the other foot so I could sleep.”

The technique the Pakistanis used on Abu Zubaydah was a stress position, one of 10 “enhanced interrogation methods” the CIA used on him. Almost immediately after his capture, according to declassified documents released several years ago, top Bush administration officials discussed using an “alternative” set of interrogation methods “because the CIA believed that Abu Zubaydah was withholding imminent-threat information during the initial interrogation sessions.”

A Viet Cong prisoner is interrogated by U.S. forces in a stress position in Thuong Duc, Vietnam.

 National Archives

The CIA prepared a psychological assessment of Abu Zubaydah in July 2002, based heavily on his six volumes of diaries, that focused on how to break down a man the CIA then believed was the No. 3 person in Al-Qaeda’s hierarchy. 

His diaries provide clues to how he may have hoped to respond to physical pain inflicted by his CIA interrogators — although what actually transpired in the course of his “enhanced interrogation” by U.S. operatives remains unknown.

During his interrogation in Pakistan, after a night of half-sleeping in a stress position, Abu Zubaydah once again faced the interrogator with the “big mustache,” who questioned him about the fake passport seals. Abu Zubaydah was returned to the prison cell, where, he said, he spent more than two days “standing on my feet, almost torn down.” But “God gave me help because as long as I am thinking of (the brothers who are outside the prison, I don’t feel the pain, but when I stop thinking of them, then I think of pain).”

Prince at House of Martyrs?

Another day, Abu Zubaydah was taken by bus along with his Yemeni companion to an office he calls “The Special Branch.” There, he watched the interrogation of a young man he believed might have been a Pakistani who plotted a failed assassination attempt on Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto. It’s unclear why Abu Zubaydah was present at the session. He wrote that he was forced to “sit in some place, and from the opening of the door we were revealed to — or we can see at the same time — a veiled person.”

He said after the man responded to the interrogator’s questions, he and his companion were quickly taken back to the bus and returned to the prison. Abu Zubaydah was then hooded, tied up and interrogated again by the “huge man with the big mustache.” The room, Abu Zubaydah wrote, was crowded and he could hear English words coming from near the vicinity of the “huge man.”

“The huge man started with a question which I was expecting … He said, ‘What do you know about the House of Martyrs?’ He spoke the words ‘House of Martyrs’ in Arabic, and the rest in English.”

Abu Zubaydah responded, he said, “In a very cool manner, ‘I heard about it.’”

The officer used his baton and smashed Abu Zubaydah “on the upper calf, just in the back of my left knee.”

“I said angrily, ‘What happened?’”

He was asked another question, “What do you know about the (prince of the House of Martyrs)?”

“I said angrily, ‘I don’t know him.’” The officer smashed Abu Zubaydah on the back of his calf again.

After repeated blows he said, “If the interrogation will continue in this manner, then go ahead and writing down all the answers that are appropriate for you, then I will sign, and everything will be over.” As the beating continued, Abu Zubaydah started giving false names to his questioners. He denied that he was the “prince” of the House of Martyrs. When asked about his affiliation, he denied that he was the emir of the Khaldan training camp.

“I am a sick man, and I am still taking medications … for my memory case, do you think that anyone is going to rely on me to run a camp,” he said.

Waterboarding equipment used for torture.

 Waterboarding.org

After his capture by the United States, Abu Zubaydah’s interrogations became more intense. In “The Black Banners” Soufan, one of two agents who first interrogated Abu Zubaydah at that CIA black-site prison, suggested the “enhanced interrogation techniques” were an experiment. It’s a word that he uses more than a dozen times in his book to describe the techniques first used on Abu Zubaydah.

Soufan interrogated Abu Zubaydah using traditional rapport-building techniques that, Soufan said, resulted in cooperation. It was only after two psychologists under contract to the CIA took over the interrogation in the weeks after Abu Zubaydah’s capture and used abusive methods that he began to clam up. Soufan left the black site, according to an interview he gave “60 Minutes” after the publication of his book in 2011, when one of the psychologists introduced a box to be used during Abu Zubaydah’s interrogation session that resembled a coffin.

The effectiveness of the CIA’s interrogation of Abu Zubaydah is questioned in a 6,000-page report prepared by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, which spent four years investigating the CIA’s so-called rendition, detention and interrogation program. According to Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., who chaired the panel, the report “uncovers startling details about the CIA detention and interrogation program and raises critical questions about intelligence operations and oversight.” Abu Zubaydah figures prominently in the report, the executive summary of which Al Jazeera is seeking from the Justice Department under a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit.

It is uncertain whether being held by the CIA was Abu Zubaydah’s first experience of American intelligence operatives during interrogations. He wrote that some questioning took place while he was hooded. He said at one point he heard “… some people leaving the room quietly, and I later learned that they were Americans who came to watch the interrogation with the one who is supposed to be the prince of the House of Martyrs.”

Former CIA operations officer Marc Sageman, who was based in Islamabad in the late 1980s, is now a forensic psychiatrist and reviewed Abu Zubaydah’s diaries for Al Jazeera. He believes the Americans Abu Zubaydah referred to were FBI agents who were in Pakistan hunting for Ramzi Yousef’s fellow conspirators. The FBI would not respond to questions about that possibility.

Abu Zubaydah wrote that he later learned that eight of his brothers, whom the police had arrested and whom he identifies by name, “were Mujahedeen and the others were employed by the relief agencies … They were arrested because one of them was accused of supporting Yusif Ramzi financially.” Abu Zubaydah wrote that they were eventually freed after paying the Pakistanis a bribe of more than half a million rupees.

After the “Americans” left the room, Abu Zubaydah’s hood was removed. He contorted his fingers again to make it appear as if he had a nervous breakdown. He refused to eat for three days after being returned to his prison cell. He was allowed to make a phone call, which he used to call his brothers at the House of Exile guesthouse and warned them that they should leave because they may be arrested.

The Pakistanis brought Abu Zubaydah before a judge, and he was charged with being “one of those Arab Mujahideen who has been left behind with no residency permit.” He waved his U.N. refugee card, but the judge ruled that he should be deported. He was taken to a central jail, where he was detained for three months.

But the U.N. came to his rescue. He wrote, “The United infidel nations started its job by contacting the ministry of the interior to establish my right for residency as it was stated before, so I was expecting to stay for two months in the prison …” Abu Zubaydah said an Italian and a Pakistani official from the U.N. visited him during that time and asked him about the other Arabs detained in the prison. He lied to them too, saying, “I am scared from them; they are fundamentalists.”

“Good! Be aware (sic) of them!” one of the U.N. officials said.

“I said, ‘I hate terrorism,’” Abu Zubaydah continued.

The U.N. official, “Mister Ferlando,” said after he left, “You look like a terrorist, but I know you well (apparently he meant my beard) … I said to myself, ‘Only if you knew!'”

Upon his release, Abu Zubaydah wrote that he and the brothers moved to a new guesthouse, away from the police, and he began “to steer the show one more time regarding … Khaldun affairs.”

More Charges Of Forced Drugging At Guantanamo

By: Jeff Kaye

On February 21, attorneys for six former Guantanamo prisoners took their civil case against Donald Rumsfeld and a number of U.S. military officials to federal appeals court. Rumsfeld and the others are being sued “for the torture, religious abuse and other mistreatment of plaintiffs,” according to a press release from Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR).

Unremarked in the otherwise thin press coverage of this case was the fact that four of the six former prisoners charge the U.S. with forced drugging, via pills or injections. In one case, a special riot squad known as the “Extreme Reaction Force” entered the cell of one of the prisoners to restrain him and force medications upon him.

The former prisoners were from Turkey, Uzbekistan and Algeria. According to an Agence France-Presse account published at The Raw Story the day of the hearing, “the judges will make their ruling in several weeks, but one of them, Judge David Tatel, said military and civilian officials at the Pentagon had failed in their duty.

“‘Their job is to protect the detainees from abuse, they failed to do so,’ he said.”

A year ago, the case had been dismissed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, despite the fact that three of the plaintiffs were held prisoner at Guantanamo and subjected to torture and other cruel treatment even after a Pentagon-initiated review process had found them not to be “enemy combatants.”

According to CCR’s press release, the current appeal is based in part on the fact that immunity doctrines used to shield “the actions of government officials who abused Guantánamo detainees” were based on the fact these prisoners “were suspected of being enemy combatants.” The fact that the U.S. military tortured men who were not under the category of “enemy combatant” may undermine the government’s immunity argument, or perhaps allow for a Supreme Court ruling on the matter.

Drugging Led To Inspector General Investigation

The forced use of drugs at Guantanamo and other U.S. military sites is not a minor issue, for such use of drugs is both medically unethical and illegal according to both domestic and international law. Back in Spring 2008, the controversy over reports of such forced drugging was a front-page story in the American press, leading three U.S. senators — two of whom, Joseph Biden and Chuck Hagel, are now the Vice-President of the United States and the Secretary of Defense, respectively — to task the inspector generals (IG) of both the CIA and the Department of Defense to investigate the issue.

While the CIA report is still classified, DoD released a redacted copy of their IG report to me, and Jason Leopold and I published a thorough review of that report at Truthout in July 2012. Leopold and I found that the government admitted to interrogating prisoners while they were being medicated. The government maintained such prisoners were not specifically drugged for interrogation, but for other reasons. Indeed, the military admitted to forcibly drugging prisoners who they wished to be “chemically restrained.”

In a follow-up story at Truthout in September 2012, I noted various ways in which the DoD IG report was a cover-up regarding the extent of the drugging of the prisoners.

“But while the IG report was spurred by a June 2008 Washington Post article reporting a number of former detainees’ complaints of drugging and a subsequent letter to the IG from three US senators,” I wrote, “the IG report never interviewed any of the detainees mentioned in the Post story.

“The IG interviewed only three detainees, all of whom were still held at Guantanamo. ‘We did not attempt to interview detainees who had been repatriated,’ the IG stated, which would include any of the detainees who had previously made public statements to the press that they had been forcibly drugged.”

Indeed, many former detainees have charged Guantanamo officials with forced drugging. 

For instance, a military prosecutor admitted to former detainee David Hicks’s attorney that prison authorities put drugs in Hicks’s food, as they “periodically sedated [Hicks] for non-therapeutic reasons.”

In another example, after he was forcibly repatriated to Algeria from his cell at Guantanamo, Abdul Aziz Naji, who was sentenced to prison in Algeria after his release from U.S. custody, told an Algerian newspaper that some prisoners at Guantanamo were forced “to take some medicines for three months to drive them crazy, loosing [sic] memory and committing suicide.”

New Charges About “Unspecified Pills and Injections”

Four of the six men suing Rumsfeld and the others in the CCR case charge that they were forcibly drugged at Guantanamo.

According to court documents, Yuksel Celikgogus, a 39 year old Turkish citizen, “was repeatedly forced to take unspecified pills and injections. Mr. Celikgogus asked what type of medicine he was receiving, but the guards would neither let him refuse the medication nor tell him what they were giving him.”

Twenty-six year old Turkish citizen Ibrahim Sen “was forcibly given unspecified pills and injections. The guards would neither let him resist the medication nor respond to his inquiries as to its substance.”

Nuri Mert, who is a 35 year old Turkish citizen, released, like Ceilikgogus and Sen to Turkey some years ago, suffered physical attack when he tried to resist the forced drugging.

According to the court document, “Throughout his detention at Guantánamo, Mr. Mert was forcibly given unspecified pills and injections. The guards would neither let him resist the medication nor respond to his inquiries as to its substance. In multiple instances, when Mr. Mert refused the medication, he was forcibly medicated by an Extreme Reaction Force (“ERF”) team. As is typical in such instances, a group of soldiers in riot gear burst into his cell, threw him to the ground and restrained him, carried him out of the cell, and forced him to either take pills or an injection. During his time in Camp Delta, Mr. Mert became extremely ill; he experienced severe stomach and chest pains and regular vomiting. When Mr. Mert wanted medical care, he was often deprived of such care despite frequent requests.”

Zakirjan Hasam was the fourth of the former detainees who claimed he was “forcibly medicated with pills and injections repeatedly while in Guantánamo.” Hasam is an Uzbek refugee who transferred to Albania in 2006. Along with Abu Muhammad, the other Uzbek in the case, he currently lives in a refugee camp in Tirana.

All the former detainees are said to suffer terribly from their torture at the hands of the American armed forces. According to Shayana Kadidal, Senior Staff Attorney at the Center for Constitutional Rights, “These men’s lives were irreparably damaged at Guantánamo. The U.S. government acknowledges they were wrongly imprisoned for years yet refuses to compensate them and help them rebuild their lives.”

Besides Rumsfeld, the other defendants in the suit include former Chairmen of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Richard Myers and General Peter Pace, former commanders of Joint Task Force-GTMO Major General Michael Dunlavey, Major General Geoffrey Miller and Brigadier General Jay Hood, as well as the former director of the Joint Intelligence Group at Guantanamo, Esteban Rodriguez, among many others.

Besides forced drugging with “unknown substances,” the former prisoners’ suit describes a panoply of tortuous treatment, including “beatings, short-shackling, sleep deprivation… subjection to extremes of cold or heat and light and dark, hooding, stress positions, isolation, forced shaving, forced nakedness, forced sexual contact and intimidation with vicious dogs and threats, many in concert with each other.”

Drugs and The Army Field Manual

While some of these “techniques” have now been banned by the military — such as hooding — others continue in use as official parts of the Army Field Manual, whose interrogation procedures have been propounded by President Obama’s January 22, 2009 executive order on “lawful interrogations.” These include sleep deprivation, manipulation of temperatures, isolation, and other so-called interrogation “approaches” and “techniques.”

While it is not commonly known, the Army Field Manual does allow use of drugs on detainees, so long as they do not “induce lasting or permanent mental alteration or damage.” This makes military use of drugs on prisoners even more permissive than John Yoo’s allowance to the CIA in his famous 2002 memos. Yoo had told the CIA it could not use on prisoners “mind-altering substances or other procedures calculated to disrupt profoundly the senses or the personality.” While Yoo’s stricture had a lot of room for possible abuse, the current version of the Army Field Manual allows almost any kind of drug to be used, lacking proof of “lasting or permanent mental alteration or damage.”

This is all a far cry from how the military once considered the issue of drugging prisoners. 

According to areport by the Congressional Research Service [CRS], earlier military doctrine “prohibited the use of any drugs on prisoners unless required for medical purposes.” The CRS report describes a 1961 opinion by the Army’s Judge Advocate General which stated, “’the suggested use of a chemical “truth serum” during the questioning of prisoners of war would be in violation of the obligations of the United States under the Geneva Convention Relative to the Treatment of Prisoners of War.’ From this opinion it seems clear that any attempt to extract information from an unwilling prisoner of war by the use of chemicals, drugs, physiological or psychological devices, which impair or deprive the prisoner of his free will without being in his interest, such as a bonafide medical treatment, will be deemed a violation of Articles 13 and 17 of the [Geneva] Convention.” [p. CRS-14]

Moreover, according to CRS, the 1987 version of the Army Field Manual on interrogation “suggested that the use of any drugs for interrogation purposes amounted to mental coercion.”

How far we have come since those days can be traced by how the U.S. treats the drugging of prisoners today. The full story of how the U.S. used drugs on prisoners at Guantanamo, if in fact such use is still not happening, remains to be uncovered. The military’s IG investigation was a whitewash. Meanwhile both Congress and the mainstream press have appeared to wash their hands of the matter. But the suffering of the prisoners remains, and their testimony may not be left lingering in limbo forever. Sooner or later these crimes will have their day in a court of law or other duly constituted tribunal.