What the C.I.A.'s Torture Program Looked Like to the Tortured
From https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/04/us/politics/cia-torture-drawings.html
What the C.I.A.s Torture Program Looked Like to the Tortured
Drawings done in captivity by the first prisoner known to undergo enhanced interrogation portray his account of what happened to him in vivid and disturbing ways.
An image drawn by Abu Zubaydah, a prisoner at Guantánamo Bay, shows how the C.I.A. applied an approved torture technique called cramped confinement.
Credit... Abu Zubaydah, Courtesy Mark P. Denbeaux
By Carol Rosenberg
Dec. 4, 2019
This article was produced in partnership with the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting.
GUANTÁNAMO BAY, Cuba One shows the prisoner nude and strapped to a crude gurney, his entire body clenched as he is waterboarded by an unseen interrogator. Another shows him with his wrists cuffed to bars so high above his head he is forced on to his tiptoes, with a long wound stitched on his left leg and a howl emerging from his open mouth. Yet another depicts a captor smacking his head against a wall.
They are sketches drawn in captivity by the Guantánamo Bay prisoner known as Abu Zubaydah, self-portraits of the torture he was subjected to during the four years he was held in secret prisons by the C.I.A.
Published here for the first time, they are gritty and highly personal depictions that put flesh, bones and emotion on what until now had sometimes been portrayed in popular culture in sanitized or inaccurate ways: the so-called enhanced interrogations techniques used by the United States in secret overseas prisons during a feverish pursuit of Al Qaeda after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.
In each illustration, Mr. Zubaydah the first person to be subject to the interrogation program approved by President George W. Bushs administration portrays the particular techniques as he says they were used on him at a C.I.A. black site in Thailand in August 2002.
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