{"id":47290,"date":"2014-09-15T12:00:47","date_gmt":"2014-09-15T11:00:47","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=47290"},"modified":"2015-05-05T21:30:35","modified_gmt":"2015-05-05T20:30:35","slug":"cia-tortured-al-qaeda-suspects-close-to-the-point-of-death-by-drowning-them-in-water-filled-baths","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2014\/09\/cia-tortured-al-qaeda-suspects-close-to-the-point-of-death-by-drowning-them-in-water-filled-baths\/","title":{"rendered":"CIA ‘Tortured Al-Qaeda Suspects Close to the Point of Death by Drowning Them in Water-Filled Baths’"},"content":{"rendered":"

As the US Senate prepares to release a report documenting US torture programme after 9\/11, Telegraph reveals new details about the scope of CIA excesses.<\/em><\/p>\n

07 Sep 2014 – <\/em>The CIA brought top al-Qaeda suspects close \u201cto the point of death\u201d by drowning them in water-filled baths during interrogation sessions in the years that followed the September 11 attacks, a security source has told The Telegraph.<\/p>\n

The description of the torture meted out to at least two leading al-Qaeda suspects, including the alleged 9\/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, far exceeds the conventional understanding of waterboarding, or \u201csimulated drowning\u201d so far admitted by the CIA.<\/p>\n

\u201cThey weren\u2019t just pouring water over their heads or over a cloth,\u201d said the source who has first-hand knowledge of the period. \u201cThey were holding them under water until the point of death, with a doctor present to make sure they did not go too far. This was real torture.\u201d<\/p>\n

The account of extreme CIA interrogation comes as the US Senate prepares to publish a declassified version of its so-called Torture Report \u2013 a 3,600-page report document based on a review of several million classified CIA documents.<\/p>\n

Publication of the report is currently being held up by a dispute over how much of the 480-page public summary should remain classified, but it is expected to be published within weeks.<\/p>\n

A second source who is familiar with the Senate report told The Telegraph that it contained several unflinching accounts of some CIA interrogations which \u2013 the source predicted \u2013 would \u201cdeeply shock\u201d the general public.<\/p>\n

Dianne Feinstein, the Democrat chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee that authored the report has promised that it will expose \u201cbrutality that stands in stark contrast to our values as a nation\u201d. The Senate report is understood to accuse the CIA of lying and of grossly exaggerating the usefulness of torture.<\/p>\n

It is being angrily opposed by many senior Republicans, former CIA operatives and Bush-era officials, including the former US vice president Dick Cheney, who argue that is it poorly researched and politically motivated.<\/p>\n

The CIA has previously admitted that it used black sites to subject at least three high-value al-Qaeda detainees to \u201cenhanced interrogation\u201d \u2013 namely Mohammed, the alleged USS Cole bomber Abd al Rahim al Nashiri and alleged senior Bin Laden aide Abu Zubaydah.<\/p>\n

An internal report in 2004 by the CIA\u2019s own Office of Inspector General admitted that Mohammed had been \u201cwaterboarded\u201d 183 times and Abu Zubaydah 83 times \u2013 but actual details of how the interrogations were administered have never been provided.<\/p>\n

When the 109-page CIA report was made public in 2009 following a freedom of information lawsuit, large portions of it remained redacted \u2013 or blacked out \u2013 including all 23 pages that followed the factual admission that interrogators \u201capplied the waterboard technique\u201d to Mohammed.<\/p>\n

An official CIA description of waterboarding in the 2004 report says that a cloth is used to cover a subject\u2019s nose and mouth and is saturated with water for \u201cno more than 20 seconds\u201d before being removed. A stream of water is then \u201cdirected at the upper lip\u201d in order to prolong \u201cthe sense of suffocation\u201d.<\/p>\n

However the report also admits that waterboarding was being carried in a \u201cmanner different\u201d from that prescribed in the US military\u2019s standard SERE training manual, but details were not revealed, beyond the frequency of the treatment, which was admitted to have broken guidelines.<\/p>\n

Among the additional difficulties for investigators seeking the truth about what happened is the fact that in November 2005 the CIA destroyed some 92 video tapes of its waterboarding and interrogation of Mohammed and the others.<\/p>\n

The officer responsible, Jose Rodriquez, was reprimanded but justified his actions by arguing that he feared the tapes would eventually leak to the media, provoking a backlash that would endanger officers\u2019 lives.<\/p>\n

The White House and the State Department fear that the Senate report could still cause a backlash and have made preparations for increased security at sensitive sites when it is eventually published.<\/p>\n

Despite the destruction of video evidence, however, a third source familiar with the still-classified accounts of the most severe of the CIA interrogations, said that the practices were much more brutal than is widely understood.<\/p>\n

\u201cThey got medieval on his ass, and far more so than people realise,\u201d the source told The Telegraph referring to the treatment of Mohammed and Nashiri, but declined to provide further details because of the still-classified nature of the material.<\/p>\n

Amrit Singh, a lawyer with the New York-based Open Society Justice Initiative and the author of Administration of Torture, a book detailing the Bush administration\u2019s torture policy, said the new details of the CIA excesses should not come as a surprise.<\/p>\n

\u201cGiven the lengths that Bush-era CIA officials went to cover up the truth, including destroying videotapes depicting waterboarding of prisoners, it comes as no surprise that the torture was more brutal than previously revealed.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt is, however, something that the American public has a right to know about, and an obligation to reckon with, and these revelations only underscore the urgent need for release of the Senate intelligence committee report,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 telegraph.co.uk<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

7 Sep 2014 – As the US Senate prepares to release a report documenting US torture programme after 9\/11, Telegraph reveals new details about the scope of CIA excesses.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[65],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-47290","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-anglo-america"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47290","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=47290"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47290\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=47290"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=47290"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=47290"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}