A detainee held in the US prison camp at Guantanamo Bay who was used as a human guinea pig in the CIA’s post-9/11 torture program has produced the most comprehensive and detailed account yet seen of the brutal techniques to which he was subjected.
Abu Zubaydah has created a series of 40 drawings that chronicle the torture he endured in a number of CIA dark sites between 2002 and 2006 and at Guantánamo Bay. In the absence of a full official accounting of the torture program, which the CIA and the FBI have labored for years to keep secret, the images give a unique and searing insight into a grisly period in US history.
The drawings, which Zubaydah has annotated with his own words, depict gruesome acts of violence, sexual and religious humiliation, and prolonged psychological terror committed against him and other detainees. They were sketched from memory in his Guantánamo cell and sent to one of his lawyers, Prof Mark Denbeaux.
Together with his students at the Center for Policy and Research at Seton Hall University law school, Denbeaux compiled Zubaydah’s images and words into a new report. The Guardian is posting the report American Tortures: FBI and CIA Abuses at Dark Sites and Guantánamo, for the first time along with a set of never-before-seen sketches.
“Abu Zubaydah is the poster child for America’s torture program,” Denbeaux said. “He was the first person to be tortured, having been approved by the Department of Justice based on facts that the CIA knew to be false. His drawings are the ultimate repudiation of the failure and abuses of torture.”
The new report comes at a critical moment for Zubaydah, who is being held in Guantánamo under Kafkaesque terms. He is known as a “forever prisoner”, because he has neither been charged with a crime nor offered any prospect of release.
Last week a UN body called for him to be set free immediately, finding that his ongoing detention may be a crime against humanity. The detainee’s international legal representative, Helen Duffy, said that the judgment of the UN working group on arbitrary detention chimed with Zubaydah’s visual account of his torture.
“The drawings are a powerful depiction of what happened to him, and are remarkable given that he has not been able to communicate directly with the outside world,” she said.
Denbeaux added that the combination of the UN’s intervention and the new drawings provided a glimmer of hope that Zubaydah’s legal quandary would be addressed. “The only thing that’s ever kept him incarcerated has been silence and darkness, and now sunlight is shining on this forever prisoner,” Denbeaux said.
The US initially claimed he was a top al-Qaida operative but was forced to concede he was not even a member of the terror group. “Everybody agrees, they tortured the wrong guy; they went ahead anyway so they could get permission to torture other people,” Denbeaux said.
Zubaydah’s depictions are so accurately rendered that the faces of the CIA and FBI agents have been redacted to protect their identities. They reveal the extent to which the US government violated international laws and even its own guidelines on what it euphemistically called “enhanced interrogation techniques”.
Among the images the Guardian is publishing for the first time is one showing masked agents physically threatening Zubaydah with anal rape. The detainee also reconstructs the extremely violent technique used against him known as “walling”.
In another image, Zubaydah draws himself chained in the nude in front of a female interrogator. A further drawing shows guards threatening to desecrate the Qur’an – techniques which were never officially approved by the justice department.
“Sexual assault was never approved, nudity was never approved, humiliation by having women present was never approved, and nor was subjecting someone to prolonged torture to the point of exhaustion or worse,” Denbeaux said. In his account, Zubaydah calls the prolonged use of multiple torture techniques “the Vortex”.
Zubaydah was subjected to simulated drowning, or waterboarding, 83 times. The detainee records different variations of the technique, including one in which he was placed in a coffin-sized box that was then filled with water up to his nose.
He remained “terrified of drowning all day”, he writes.
Zubaydah’s annotations, which have been lightly edited for length and clarity, describe the abuses that Zubaydah suffered personally as the first victim of the American torture program. But Denbeaux said his client had produced the material in order to highlight not just his own suffering but also that of the many others subjected to the same techniques.
According to a 2014 summary of the Senate report, at least 119 individuals were victimized under the program.
