What the C.I.A.'s Torture Program Looked Like to the Tortured

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From https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/04/us/politics/cia-torture-drawings.html

What the C.I.A.’s Torture Program Looked Like to the Tortured
Drawings done in captivity by the first prisoner known to undergo “enhanced interrogation” portray his account of what happened to him in vivid and disturbing ways.



An image drawn by Abu Zubaydah, a prisoner at Guantánamo Bay, shows how the C.I.A. applied an approved torture technique called “cramped confinement.”
Credit... Abu Zubaydah, Courtesy Mark P. Denbeaux

By Carol Rosenberg
Dec. 4, 2019

This article was produced in partnership with the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting.

GUANTÁNAMO BAY, Cuba — One shows the prisoner nude and strapped to a crude gurney, his entire body clenched as he is waterboarded by an unseen interrogator. Another shows him with his wrists cuffed to bars so high above his head he is forced on to his tiptoes, with a long wound stitched on his left leg and a howl emerging from his open mouth. Yet another depicts a captor smacking his head against a wall.

They are sketches drawn in captivity by the Guantánamo Bay prisoner known as Abu Zubaydah, self-portraits of the torture he was subjected to during the four years he was held in secret prisons by the C.I.A.

Published here for the first time, they are gritty and highly personal depictions that put flesh, bones and emotion on what until now had sometimes been portrayed in popular culture in sanitized or inaccurate ways: the so-called enhanced interrogations techniques used by the United States in secret overseas prisons during a feverish pursuit of Al Qaeda after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

In each illustration, Mr. Zubaydah — the first person to be subject to the interrogation program approved by President George W. Bush’s administration — portrays the particular techniques as he says they were used on him at a C.I.A. black site in Thailand in August 2002.

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[duforsure]

1. If trump is given absolute power

He'll use it against the people in any way he can, including using torture to prevent exposure, and to use to intimidate and manipulate whatever he wants , forcing others to say what he wants so he can promote it as the truth. All opposition, all minorities , all religions he hates should be very scared he could use these tactics against them with republicans allowing it because they're too scared and blackmailed by putin and trump too stop him. trump is already setting it up to use , and Barr is helping him by his latest threat to terrorize Americans he hates with his position and power.