Guantanamo Bay: Graphic drawings allege CIA's 'borderline torture' of Abu Zubaydah

Andrew Buncombe,
The Independent





New images have been published showing waterboarding and other abuse and torture carried by the CIA on an alleged al-qaeda prisoner- actions prohibited by UN agreements and the Geneva Conventions.

That hand sketches by Abu Zubaydah, a Pakistani arrested in 2002 and handed over to the US, show him being being beaten, forced to lie in a coffin-like box filled with water and water-boarded, a form of simulated drowning.

Zubaydah, who is of around 40 prisoners still being held at Guantanamo Bay, the controversial, secretive prison located on the tip of Cuba, says he been tortured at various locations, including at so-called “black sites”, operated by the CIA in countries such as Poland and Thailand as part of the “war on terror”.

The current head of the Central Intelligence Agency, Gina Haspel, oversaw one such site where torture was carried out.

“It’s absolutely brutal,” Charles Church, one of Zubaydah’s lawyers, said of the treatment shown in images, published by CNN.

He told The Independent: “For the first four or so years, he was held in these black sites, and he was tortured for a lot of that time.”

In 2014, the US Senate released a report on the years of torture carried out by CIA officers and civilian contractors, purportedly to extract information from the prisoners. It said officials had lied about what was being done, and its effectiveness.

“The use of the CIA’s enhanced interrogation techniques was not an effective means of obtaining accurate information or gaining detainee cooperation,” said the report, released amid opposition from the administration of Barack Obama.

“The interrogations of CIA detainees were brutal and far worse than the CIA represented to policymakers and others.”

After Mr Obama was elected to the White House in 2008, he banned the use of such techniques.

By contrast, Donald Trump has defended the use of torture.

“Don’t tell me it doesn’t work – torture works,” MrTrump said while campaigning in 2016. “Okay, folks? You know, half these guys say ‘Torture doesn’t work’. Believe me, it works. Okay.”
Story continues.


Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Defining the Biden Doctrine

George Soros at the Davos Forum