The Exile Read online

  Later, Zubaydah glimpsed another wooden box, much smaller than the first and barely the dimensions of a child’s coffin. “With the help of the guards, he shoved me inside.”18

  It was twenty-one inches wide, two and a half feet high, and two and a half feet deep. Zubaydah called it the dog box. “The stress on my legs … meant my wounds both in the leg and stomach became very painful. It was hot and sweaty inside. The wound on my leg began to open and started to bleed. I don’t know how long I remained in the small box, I think I may have slept or maybe fainted.”19 Cramped and immobile, Zubaydah was soon in agony. “I felt I was going to explode.”20

  The waterboarding came next. “I didn’t hear or feel them come nor heard them turn the lock,” Zubaydah recalled. Hauled out of the box, he saw that before him was a metal bed “that had many belts in every direction.” It looked like a medieval rack.

  “I was totally restrained to the point that I was unable to make any movement whatsoever. They restrained me in a lying down position. Obviously, even the wounded thigh was strongly restrained under the gauze. I felt the wounds were opening … After they restrained my body, they restrained my head as well with the help of strong plastic cushions on the sides, which made it impossible for me to move it, not even for one centimeter to the left or one centimeter to the right, and obviously neither upward nor downward.” Zubaydah felt a black cloth being pulled over his head. Then water was poured onto his face.

  “It shocked me because it was very cold,” he recalled. The water didn’t stop but continuously poured and flowed over his mouth and nose. “So the idea was … aimed at giving me the feeling of drowning.” And it worked. “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. Indeed that was the first time and the first day that I felt I was going to die from drowning … All I know or remember is that I started vomiting water but also rice and string beans.”

  One of the CIA interrogators would later tell the CIA’s Office of the Inspector General that Mitchell and Jessen’s SERE school model was based on resisting North Vietnamese “physical torture” methods, which had included waterboarding. But doing it in the classroom and for real were not the same, according to the interrogator, who said that the CIA “needed a different working model for interrogating terrorists.”21

  After a pause, a second wave of waterboarding started. “They performed the same operation three times on [the first day],” Zubaydah later wrote in his diary. “And every time they were deflating the cushion that was holding my head a little bit and so I would feel my head lowered a little bit, which made it ever more difficult for me to bear water flowing inside of me.” After they interrupted the operation for a few minutes to allow him to breathe or vomit, they resumed. “After the third time on that day, they kept the hood, soaked in water, on my head and started asking me questions … Then, they removed me from the bed and dragged me to the box; they shoved me inside and locked the door.”22 The procedure lasted in total two and a half hours, during which, according to the official report, Zubaydah suffered “involuntary spasms of the torso and extremities.”23

  Mitchell would later confirm that he had taken part in that first waterboarding session and that Jessen had helped him, although he claimed he had tried to calm everything down.24 “The [Justice Department legal] memo says that in a waterboarding session, you can pour an application of water for 20 to 40 seconds to give that person a chance to breathe, then another 20 to 40 seconds, and you can do that for 20 minutes,” he said.25 According to Mitchell, it became clear early in the first session that too much water was being poured. “We decided we would do two 20-second sessions and one 40-second session, and the rest would be from 1 to 10 seconds. The CIA [Inspector General] sent a lawyer out with a stopwatch and a counter to measure the average amount of time water was poured in a single waterboarding session. The average amount of time was 10 seconds.”

  For Zubaydah, even when he was recovering in one of the boxes, there was no letup. “I suddenly felt a strong strike that shook the box from outside followed by several other stronger strikes,” he recalled.26 “They shook the box so heavily, which made me fall from the bucket. The strikes continued. There were probably ten strikes. Then every quarter of an hour they would bang again ten times, maybe to make sure I am unable to sleep. Yet with the time, the fatigue, the headache and the pain it seemed to me I was able to sleep for a very short time. And I started hearing the bangs as in a dream. They would wake me, I would count them and then fall asleep again.”27

  A CIA cameraman recorded every minute, creating a complete record that would ultimately run to ninety-two tapes.28 “The little box, the water bed, the long box,” it went round and round.

  The waterboarding increased “from three to four and sometimes five sessions,” as, according to Zubaydah’s diary, the CIA team added new twists. “1) Keeping me on my feet tied up for long hours, wet with water and urine to the point where I felt my legs, especially the wounded one, were just about to explode from pressure, and my back as well. 2) They kept me lying down on the water bed for long hours … This time, my head was tied up and restrained in one direction and the wet black cloth was entirely covering my head which added to the pain resulting from the contraction in the neck, the back, the limbs, the joints, the muscles and the nerves … 3) They increased the amount of cold water that was being poured over my naked cold body.”29

  To further humiliate Zubaydah, medical personnel contracted to the CIA’s Office of Medical Staff (OMS) recommended the intake of just 1,500 calories per day. As little as 1,000 calories a day was still “safe and sustainable for weeks on end.”30 Food mainly consisted of the high-protein shake Ensure, and the preferred method to forcibly feed a detainee refusing to eat was “rectally.”

  The questioning continued, an interrogator demanding to know about future terrorist operations against the United States: names, phone numbers, e-mail addresses, weapons caches, and safe houses. “I tried to speak or yell with my head covered, shouting ‘I don’t know anything,’ but I suddenly felt the water flowing again,” recalled Zubaydah. Every time Zubaydah denied he was in Al Qaeda or knew anything, an interrogator banged his head against the wall. “Before I could finish my sentence the beating started again and my head and back were brutally banged against the wall.”

  During one especially grueling session, Zubaydah felt his body was being ripped apart. “There were tears in my eyes, my nose was leaking and even my genital organ was involuntarily discharging,” he recalled.31

  In total, Zubaydah spent more than eleven days inside the large coffin-size box and twenty-nine hours inside the smaller one, his interrogators telling him that the only way he would leave the facility was “in a box.”32 “They did the same thing again and again: the banging against the wall, the little box, the water bed, the long box,” he recalled. During at least one waterboarding session, he “became completely unresponsive, with bubbles rising through his open, full mouth.”33

  Despite this, Zubaydah offered up “no useful information.”

  The log from Detention Site Green recorded that the Enhanced Interrogation Techniques continued in “varying combinations, 24 hours a day” for seventeen straight days through to August 20.34 During the interrogators’ downtime, Zubaydah was left strapped with a cloth over his face, or locked in one of the coffins. He tried to place himself somewhere else, reciting the lyrics to “Sailor,” his favorite Chris de Burgh song, about being lost at sea and dreaming of going home.

  But Chris de Burgh did not work. A cable noted that Zubaydah “cried,” “begged,” “pleaded,” “whimpered,” and denied knowledge of any ongoing Al Qaeda plans.35 “I vomited each time I was put in the vertical position between the suffocation,” Zubaydah recalled.36 He began losing control of his body. “This is very similar to the shaking I noticed years ago after I was wounded in my head and lost my memory.” He would go to sleep shaking
and wake up shaking. He also began uncontrollable mumbling.

  Some CIA staff at Detention Site Green were by now chafing. On August 5, 2002, one official cable read: “Want to caution [medical officer] that this is almost certainly not a place he’s ever been before in his medical career … It is visually and psychologically very uncomfortable.”37

  On August 8, another noted: “Today’s first session … had a profound effect on all staff members present … It seems the collective opinion that we should not go much further.”38

  A third cable written on the same day reported: “Several on the team profoundly affected … some to the point of tears and choking up.”39

  The next day another cable stated that two, possibly three, personnel were likely to elect to transfer away from the detention site if a decision was made to continue.40

  Dr. Mitchell later claimed that he was one of those raising concerns and that he and Jessen considered resigning after they were told to continue waterboarding Zubaydah despite the fact that they said it was no longer necessary to do so.41 According to the Senate report on CIA torture, the chief of support services at Detention Site Green said that Mitchell and Jessen were “frustrated that they kept beating Zubaydah up on the same question while getting the same physiologic response from him.”42

  By August 9, the sixth day of enhanced interrogations, the CIA in-country team informed Langley that they had come to the “collective preliminary assessment” that it was unlikely Abu Zubaydah “had actionable new information about current threats to the United States.” The following day they sent another cable reinforcing the message: it was “highly unlikely” that Zubaydah possessed the information they were seeking.43

  Officials at CTC headquarters led by Jose Rodriguez insisted the procedures continue.44 The subject was still withholding information, in their assessment. In his filthy cell, surrounded by excrement, vomit, urine, and hair, Zubaydah was by now so conditioned by his treatment that all the interrogator had to do was snap his fingers twice to get him to lie down on the waterboard.45 His sense of “learned helplessness” was fully developed.

  “The torture continued using the same methods during the period of drowning that was not limited to water but also urine, in addition to the heavy vomiting that was breaking my head in two and tearing apart my stomach—that was already wounded,” Zubaydah later wrote in his prison diary. “The long closed wound that goes through my belly and appears a little under the chest … seemed as if it opened internally during every episode of vomiting or after drowning or during long standings or even by just sitting down.”

  An interrogation tape recorded on August 11 was labeled with a warning to “prepare for something not seen previously.”46 At times Zubaydah became so hysterical that he was unable to communicate.

  The interrogation team demanded that someone come from headquarters for a “first-hand on-the-ground look” as the treatment was “approaching the legal limit.”47 After reviewing “quite graphic” videotapes of Zubaydah’s recent sessions on a conference call, headquarters agreed to send a team.48

  Zubaydah recalled the day that the visitors from Langley arrived. “The hood was lifted and I saw two other individuals: a man and a woman in civilian clothes,” he wrote later in his diary. “It took minutes before I realized that I was completely naked in front of a woman. For moral and religious reasons I covered my genitals with my hands.”

  The man threw Zubaydah against the wall. “Don’t start getting angry again otherwise we’ll start again from zero. Understood?” At this point, the woman started reading questions from a piece of paper she was holding. Zubaydah noticed that her hands were trembling.

  After the visitors went back to the United States, the interrogations continued. No one stopped it, although one interrogator came who was better than the rest. In his head Zubaydah called him “Mr. Its-gonna-be-fine.”49

  That month, Mitchell and Jessen sent a cable to CIA headquarters describing Zubaydah’s interrogation as a success and recommending that the “aggressive phase at [DETENTION SITE GREEN] should be used as a template for future interrogation of high value captives.”50

  October 30, 2002, 2 A.M., Islamabad, Pakistan

  In his sharp, starched shalwar kameez, pinstriped waistcoat, and moonstone-colored pakul, Dr. Ghairat Baheer was a famous face about town. An Afghan national living openly in Islamabad, he was the son-in-law and spokesman for warlord Gulbuddin Hekmatyar. Everyone—from his neighbors to the police posted at the bottom of his street and the ISI agents who hung about outside his house—knew he was a portal into the Afghan jihad movement. But because he had never taken part in any militant activities, Dr. Baheer thought he was safe.

  On October 29, 2002, an acquaintance named Gul Rahman, a father of four daughters who lived in Peshawar, stopped overnight. Formerly an assistant to Dr. Baheer’s father-in-law, Rahman needed to stay due to a postponed medical appointment and, after calling Peshawar to warn his wife he would not be home until the following day, he joined Dr. Baheer for dinner.

  At just before two A.M., with everyone asleep, Dr. Baheer’s doorbell rang. Then a group of men barged in. “Without any explanation, they just grabbed me, put a hood over my head, tied my hands with plastic cuffs, and threw me into a van,” Dr. Baheer recalled.51 After being interrogated for a week in Islamabad, he and Rahman, who had also been seized, were taken blindfolded and cuffed to the airport. “Men with American accents grabbed me under the arms, threw me on the floor, cut off my clothes, and tossed my Koran against the wall,” said Dr. Baheer.

  When he started weeping at the desecration of his holy book, the Americans mocked him. “You’re a very brave man, why are you crying?” He was dressed in an orange jumpsuit, with a hood and goggles, before being dragged onto a military transporter and strapped to a chair, with an American contractor sitting on his chest.

  Dr. Baheer and Rahman were told they were being flown to Peshawar, but instead they were taken to an abandoned brick factory northeast of Kabul. As a result of the experimentations in Thailand and a recent report to President Bush that Abu Zubaydah’s enhanced interrogations had provided “key intelligence,” the CIA secret prisons and torture program were growing. Detention Site Cobalt—as the brick factory was now renamed—was the latest grim addition.52 Below ground and completely out of sight was a second holding area that was dubbed “the Salt Pit.”

  Clinical psychologist Dr. Bruce Jessen was already there when Dr. Baheer and Rahman arrived, working in a prison where noncompliant detainees were kept naked or in diapers and were chained in darkness to a rail above their heads or to the floor.53 Loud music was pumped into cells day and night.

  As the winter temperatures plummeted, the cells dropped to a few degrees below zero and detainees were subjected to freezing blasts of water that the guards called “the shower from hell” and that brought on severe convulsions.54

  The guards also performed mock executions by firing handguns outside, then parading detainees past a cell to view hooded guards lying on the floor as if they were dead.55

  Like many others held there, Dr. Baheer described his new home as “the dark prison.” He recalled, “All I saw for months was the end of a [flashlight],” explaining how he spent his time in a six-foot-square cement cell with Michael Jackson songs pumping in so loudly that his captors wore ear protectors. The Americans suspected that as Hekmatyar’s son-in-law, he could reveal Osama bin Laden’s location. They also wanted to know about a $1 million hawala payment from unnamed Arab donors to his father-in-law’s group, Hezb-i-Islami Gulbuddin (an offshoot of the Hezb-i-Islami network). Had it also been used to fund the Al Qaeda leader’s life in exile after he fled Tora Bora?

  When he wasn’t being interrogated, Dr. Baheer listened to the whimpers of other detainees, who whispered messages into the water pipes connecting their cells—one of them telling him he was Abu Yahya al-Libi, the Mauritanian’s former pupil, and that he had been betrayed by Pashtun villagers in the tribal belt.

&nb
sp; One day, interrogators locked Dr. Baheer inside a coffin-size box. Dr. James Mitchell was also at the Detention Site Cobalt around this time, but Dr. Baheer does not know if he met him.

  Dr. Baheer struggled to breathe as an American voice screamed through the lid. “Where is Mullah Omar? Where is Hekmatyar? Where is Osama bin Laden? We won’t let you out until you tell us.”

  Dr. Baheer recited his prayers.

  “Where is Hekmatyar? Do you know?” the American shouted, banging on the lid.

  Exhausted and in pain, Dr. Baheer yelled back. “Yes,” he spluttered. “I know where they all are.”

  The lid was flipped open. “Do you know Osama?”

  “Yes, I’ve met him twenty times. And I’m not telling you.” The lid slammed shut.

  Later, Dr. Baheer was hauled out naked, carried to the shower room, and blasted with freezing-cold water.

  “It kept pouring. So cold.”

  Convulsing and still naked, he was taken back to his cell and manacled into a crucifixion position. A female interrogator began to question him as two male interrogators beat him from both sides.

  Dr. Baheer later claimed that he lost almost ninety pounds in the first month.56 But his friend Gul Rahman suffered even worse. One day, Dr. Baheer had no idea which day, the whispers along the pipes carried worrying news: guards had been seen carrying a body bag out of Rahman’s cell.

  Rahman’s wife would not find out her husband’s fate until a reporter called her seven years later and informed her that Rahman had been found dead in his cell on November 20, 2002.57

  According to a subsequent report by the CIA Inspector General, Dr. Bruce Jessen was involved in Rahman’s interrogation, conducting six sessions with him, including one in which he had deployed the “insult slap.”

  In another session, Dr. Jessen witnessed but was not involved in a “hard takedown” of Rahman, which involved a team of four or five guards cutting off his clothes, securing his hands with Mylar tape, and putting a hood over his head. Now naked, Rahman was slapped and punched in the stomach and made to run up and down the corridor outside his cell.