New
details have been disclosed about the CIA’s torture program at a
black site prison near Kabul, Afghanistan, thanks to newly unsealed
documents the spy agency and US Defense Department were forced to
declassify over a lawsuit filed by victims of the torture program.
The newly revealed papers expose
in shocking detail how the agency integrated two contract
psychologists to design brutal torture techniques to break detainees’
resistance and give torture the appearance of legality.
Two surviving prisoners and the
family of a detainee who died at the ‘Cobalt’ site in Afghanistan
reached an out-of-court settlement with CIA psychologists James
Mitchell and Bruce Jessen in August after a lawsuit was filed for
their role in the torture.
The CIA and Pentagon were forced
to declassify the documents related to the case in pretrial
discovery. The memos also capture high-level agency discussions
revealing a cover-up in action.
The Cobalt site, which opened
outside Kabul in September 2002, was made up of 20 cells, according
to the documents. In 16 cells, prisoners were shackled to a metal
ring in the wall. In four, designed for sleep deprivation, they stood
chained by the wrists to an overhead bar.
The cells were unheated, and
inmates were subjected to blaring music around the clock.
“The atmosphere was very
good,” Jessen told CIA investigators. “Nasty, but safe.”
The Cobalt site came to be
referred to as "The Darkness" by inmates for its full
sensory deprivation darkness which detainees experienced round the
clock, sometimes for years.
Mitchell and Jessen designed a
list of "techniques" to be used to torture prisoners,
including waterboarding (causing the individual to experience the
sensation of drowning and walling (slamming inmates into flexible
walls).
The objective was to "reach
the stage where we have broken any will or ability of subject to
resist or deny providing us information," the pair
unambiguously stated.
Jessen had been visiting the site
to oversee the interrogation of Gul Rahman, a detainee who was
interrogated for several weeks in November.
Rahman, wearing only socks and a
diaper in the unheated cells, was subjected to 48 hours of sleep
deprivation and cold showers, despite concerns by one supervisor that
he might develop hypothermia.
Five days after Jessen left the
site, Rahman died of hypothermia. He had been left in his cell naked
from the waist down.
The two psychologists were paid
$80 million for their work, which included helping interrogate Khalid
Sheikh Mohammed, the alleged mastermind of the September 11, 2001
attacks, and Abu Zubaydah, another top al-Qaeda official.
The Senate Intelligence Committee
released a report in 2014 about CIA's brutal detention and
interrogation program and its use of various forms of torture on
detainees between 2001 and 2006 during the so-called war on terror.
The report concluded that the spy
agency’s interrogation methods were far more brutal and less
effective than what the agency had publicly acknowledged.
The report also said that not a
single terrorist attack was foiled as a result of the use of the
so-called harsh interrogation techniques.
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