Guantanamo Bay detainee: I lived through CIA torture

I learned new facts about my detention and torture from the CIA torture report summary. Hopefully, Americans can learn not to repeat those mistakes.

Ahmed Rabbani

Opinion contributor

I will likely never be allowed to see "The Report." In the movie, Adam Driver plays Daniel J. Jones, the staffer for Sen. Dianne Feinstein who spent several years putting together a 6,700 page Senate committee report on the CIA’s use of torture in the wake of 9/11. 

The censors will not likely let the movie reach my detention center at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

My lawyers have told me about it. As it happens, I was one of the few detainees allowed to receive a copy of the heavily redacted executive summary of the report, under the rule that says a prisoner can see such unclassified material if it pertains to him. My name appears multiple times in the report. For a nobody taxi driver from Karachi, Pakistan, that is a regrettable claim to fame.

It is interesting to hear about the film, and I am glad Amazon had the courage to make it. On the other hand, there are some omissions that make me sad. There is no explanation why Daniel Jones only reviewed CIA documents and never spoke to us, the victims of torture. I cannot think of another inquiry like it. Imagine that inquests into genocide in Rwanda or the former Yugoslavia took place hearing only from the murderers but not from those who suffered, or their families?

Enhanced interrogation is torture

If Jones had asked, I would have told him that his footnote 595 — where the CIA asserts that I only suffered “forced standing, attention grasps and cold temperatures” in the dark prison in Afghanistan — was a cruel joke.

I would have described the week I spent in a dark pit hanging by my wrists, forever on tiptoes, while my shoulders gradually dislocated — what the Spanish Inquisition used to call “strappado.” I would have mentioned the ear-splitting noise blasted at me round the clock and the beatings every time I began to sleep.

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My name appears in a table of 119 people subjected to the CIA’s “enhanced interrogation techniques.” Does anyone believe that these “EITs” were not torture? If so, they should try it sometime.

I am also one of 17 prisoners whose torture happened “without the approval” of the CIA. Is it a better, or uglier, reflection on the CIA if torture was authorized? And was the CIA officer who tortured me without permission punished for it, or was he possibly promoted for his patriotic labors?

Some elements of my torture I have long known — I was there — but I did learn some important facts from the executive summary. The Pakistani authorities arrested me and turned me over to the United States, saying I was terrorist Hassan Ghul. I denied this from day one of my detention, Sept. 10, 2002.

At the time, the CIA officers seemed sure I was Ghul — they interrogated me about it endlessly. Apparently, they were less credulous than I thought. On page 325, I read that by Sept. 11, 2002, "it was determined that an individual named Muhammad Ahmad Ghulam Rabbani, aka Abu Badr, and his driver were arrested, not Hassan Ghul.”

In other words, they knew they had made a mistake within a day. More than 6,200 days later, they still keep me detained. 

Showing a taste of the truth

At one point, they actually captured Hassan Ghul. In January 2004, after I had spent over a year in detention, he was brought to the dark prison called Detention Site Cobalt, but he was found to be “cooperative" and so was there for only two days and was initially not subjected to any EITs. 

Ghul was later released back to Pakistan, free to resume his wicked ways, but a U.S. drone finally killed him in 2012. 

I, meanwhile, was sent to Guantanamo Bay in September 2004 to become a forever prisoner — held without trial for 17 years and counting.

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The cynic in me wonders how Ghul could be seen as “cooperative” while I was not. This is not ineptitude — it is insanity.

My lawyers tell me that I only appear in the film as a picture on the wall of the secure facility in the CIA basement where Jones toiled for so long. I am sorry that I am unlikely to see it for myself, but I would like to thank those who made it, as well as the real Daniel Jones.

Nothing can change what happened to me, as that is in the past. I do want the world to know about the torture we suffered at the hands of CIA officers, though, because if we do not learn from history we will be doomed to repeat our mistakes — and I would hate for anyone else to endure what I have had to endure. For now, I encourage everyone to watch "The Report," to get just a taste of the truth.

Ahmed Rabbani is from Karachi, Pakistan. He has been detained in Guantanamo Bay for more than 15 years.