When Gina Haspel was appointed by Donald Trump to be the new director of the CIA, it was already known that she had been part of that agency’s “extraordinary rendition” program. That was a program where suspected terrorists where ferried to “black sites,” secret bases at which the CIA carried out torture of prisoners at locations conveniently outside the US. Haspel didn’t just send people to these torture facilities, she ran one—a site in Thailand were suspects were tortured dozens, if not hundreds, of times.
Haspel claimed that the site had produced “valuable evidence,” but newly available dispatches, made available by the National Security Archive, many of which may have been written by Haspel herself, detail some of her time at the secret base. What they show is plenty of torture … but no evidence that it gained anything of value.
The memos cover activities at the base concerning one man, Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, who was suspected in involvement with the bombing of the USS Cole, a US Navy destroyer bombed during a fueling stop in Yemen in 2000. The suspect in this case was shaved and locked in a box for an extended period of time, Then he was slammed against a wall, beaten, and waterboarded. Repeatedly. He confessed. That confession, derived through abuse and torture, would not be admissible in any court, and it appears that the torture gained absolutely no evidence that helped stop any ongoing or future terrorist activities.
In the first session described, al-Nashiri was “aggressively interrogated”—a euphemism for torture. This interrogation included al-Nashiri standing at “the walling wall” where many applications of “the walling technique” where applied. Then, al-Nashiri was subjected to “multiple-applications of the watering technique.” In other words, the suspect was smashed against a wall repeatedly, then strapped down and waterboarded repeatedly—and that was his first session. Al-Nashiri may genuinely be a bad guy with personal responsibility in an attack that took the life of 17 US sailors. But no one will ever know. Because Gina Haspel directly participated in destroying any opportunity to get at the truth. Instead, what she got was the truth that torturers have known for millennia—anyone will confess to anything, if you are cruel enough for long enough.
“The subject was told he was going to suffer.”
And he did.
Just one paragraph out of the first session is enough to demonstrate the utter futility of what was going on at the secret base, and the uselessness of torture in general.
As the interrogation ran though a list of names … subject continued to deny that he knew any of them. Interrogators continued to apply the walling technique, while repeating that subject was not giving the responses they needed.
In other words, they took a man who was tied against a wall, and said a name, and each time he said he didn’t know that person, they smashed him against that wall. The ability of this procedure to produce anything resembling a truthful response is laughable—and gag inducing.
In the same session, after pummeling the subject against a wall hadn’t generated the answers they wanted, they changed tactics.
Interrogators, commenting that this line of questioning was just not working, moved subject to the water board and had him recline. While strapping him in, interrogators provided a litany of the topics subject could talk about to stop what was about to come.
And again … idiocy. The level of callous indifference, and depraved imbecility displayed in these documents is simply painful to read.
In between physical torture sessions, the site conducted other types of torture, like blasting the subject awake when he was on the verge of sleep, harrying him from place to place, and warning him that if he didn’t confess they would take him to somewhere worse. And, for all we know, there might have been somewhere worse. This secret facility, which was somewhere in Thailand, might have been the intro site. The first step to the even more asinine cruelty doled out by us torturers at another site. We do not know.
But Gina Haspel does. Despite her participation in a covert program that clearly broke both US law and international agreements, Haspel was approved with a 54-45 vote, including that of six Democratic Senators. The National Security Archives requested the documents before Haspel’s approval, but they are only now becoming public.
Other documents connected to al-Nashuri’s torture sessions were released after a Propublica investigation in May. Neither set of documents makes for easy reading.