U.S. still holding 'forever prisoner' without charge at Guantánamo

A REPORT published last month featuring previously unreleased drawings by Abu Zubaydah, a 52-year-old Saudi who has been imprisoned by the United States for more than 20 years at CIA 'black sites' and Guantánamo Bay, offers new insight into alleged torture suffered by a man caught up in a case of mistaken identity

- BRETT WILKINS

The report, entitled American Torturers: FBI and CIA Abuses at Dark Sites and Guantánamo, is based on sketches and descriptions by Zubaydah and other War on Terror torture victims and was led by Seton Hall University law professor Mark Denbeaux and University of California, San Francisco psychiatry professor Jess Ghannam, with the help of Seton Hall law students.

"Despite the efforts of the federal government, particularly the Central Intelligence Agency, to conceal evidence of the actual operation of the 'enhanced interrogation techniques' (EITS) deployed on detainees in dark sites and at Guantánamo, a steady drumbeat of disclosures has provided an unparalleled view into this disgraceful episode in the nation's history," the report states.

"Everybody agrees, they tortured the wrong guy; they went ahead anyway so they could get permission to torture other people."

The report notes that Zubaydah's drawings "viscerally convey the brutal reality the CIA sought to hide with its calculated destruction of video recordings of torture by its agents," and "dovetail with the recent accounts of Dr. James Mitchell, a chief architect of the torture regime, who both wrote a book on EITs and testified in conducted hearings on Guantánamo.

"These sources, together with the report of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, provide the most complete and compelling-account to date of America's torture program" in the years after the September 11, 2001 attacks on the United States."