Comment - What the U.S. Torture Program Looked Like to the Tortured

What the U.S. Torture Program Looked Like to the Tortured

By Carol Rosenberg

a drawing of a face

Caution: This article contains graphic details that may be distressing for some readers.

December 06, 2019 "Information Clearing House" - 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 CIA.

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 sanitised 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.

© Abu Zubaydah, Courtesy Mark P. Denbeaux

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

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