The Spy in the Torture Chamber
Gina Haspel: Out of the Black But Still in the Dark
Gina Haspel testifies at her confirmation hearing to become director of the CIA, May 9, 2018. (CBS News)
Did Agent Zula Nine Alpha lurk in the shadows of the black site in Thailand she ran as the two torture shrinks strapped a man down and poured water down his throat until he felt as if he was drowning, over and over again? Or did she step into the harsh interrogation light to let the terrified man glimpse the face of the woman who was supervising his torments? He had been stripped naked; every part of his body exposed before this silent, severe woman. Was it part of the plan? To ratchet up the psychological humiliation? To squeeze him from every angle until he broke?
The man’s name is Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri. He is a Saudi, who the CIA fingered as an Al Qaeda member who helped plan the 2000 bombing of the USS Cole, while it was docked in the harbor at Aden in Yemen. Two years later, Al-Nashiri was nabbed in Dubai by a CIA snatch-and-grab unit and hustled off to a CIA prison in Afghanistan. For the next four years, al-Nashiri was shuffled from one CIA black site to another: Thailand, Poland, Afghanistan and Romania. At each stop he was interrogated, threatened, abused, and tortured. Then in 2006, al-Nashiri was sent to Guantanamo, where he remains.
The woman is Gina Haspel. Haspel was an Air Force brat, who grew up in Kentucky and majored in journalism at the University of Louisville. After college she bounced from job to job, working as a library coordinator and a paralegal, before finding her true calling. In 1985, she joined the CIA, where she quickly climbed the ranks from a lowly reports officer to working undercover across central Asia in the 1990s. Then in 2001, just as the shit was about to hit the fan, Haspel was named Deputy Group Chief of the Agency’s Counterterrorism Center. In the fall of 2002, Haspel was sent to run a secret prison in Thailand, code-named the Cat’s Eye, where suspected Al Qaeda members swept up in the post-9/11 operations were being held, interrogated and tortured, including Abu Zubaydah and al-Nashiri.
To complete our cast of characters we must introduce the two shrinks, James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen, who designed the CIA’s “enhanced interrogation” program and were putting it into sadistic practice under Haspel’s orders in the torture chambers of the Cat’s Eye black site. Mitchell and Jessen’s consulting firm was paid $81 million for their services, granted immunity from prosecution and promised to have their legal fees covered in the event they were ever sued.
When Haspel landed in Thailand, Mitchell and Jessen had largely finished torturing Abu Zubaydah. For 8 weeks, Zubaydah had been kept naked in a tiny cell. For most of the day he was strapped to a bed or a chair, let out only to relieve himself in a bucket. The room was kept ice cold. Rock music was blasted 20 hours a day. He was beaten, slapped, walled, and waterboarded, two to four times a day for 17 straight days. In all, he was waterboarded at least 83 times. The torture sessions and interrogation were filmed. There were 92 tapes in all. He had no vital information to give.
Down the hall, in a separate small cell, was al-Nashiri, who’d been transferred to the Cat’s Eye prison from a black site in Afghanistan known as the Salt Pit, where al-Nashiri later told the International Red Cross he’d been “threatened with sodomy, and with the arrest and rape of his family.”
Frustrated by the failure of their torturous techniques to extract any useful information from Zubaydah, Mitchell and Jessen now turned their attention to al-Nashiri. The question is how closely did Haspel supervise their work? After all they weren’t CIA agents, but merely contractors hired to do a job. Haspel still won’t answer. She still hides behind the cloak of classification, as she did in 2018 when she was questioned by a slightly less-addled version of Dianne Feinstein.
But now Mitchell has finally come clean, at least to a point, placing Haspel (who he referred to using the code name Z9A) in the room where they put the screws to al-Nashiri, again and again. The disclosure came during a hearing in the Guantanamo death penalty cases (of which al-Nashiri’s is one), where defense lawyers are trying to convince the military court’s judges to exclude any evidence extracted by the use of torture or other cruel and degrading treatments at the hands of the CIA and its hired henchmen.
As Haspel watched, al-Nashiri was stripped of his clothes and tied with Velcro straps to a hospital gurney. Mitchell stretched a washcloth over the restrained man’s face, while his partner Jessen poured the water. As al-Nashiri began to gag and convulse, Mitchell told the court that she feared the slender, frail man might slip out of his straps, so they flipped the gurney up 90 degrees until he was in a standing position. Then they waterboarded him two more times, gaining no useful information from a man who had already been cooperating. Even his interrogators recommended against further torture. But the woman watching and her bosses back in DC disagreed. They wanted more. Actionable information was no longer the point. As one CIA official disparagingly said of al-Nashiri: “He was an idiot. He couldn’t read or comprehend a comic book.” Torture became the point of torture. It was the means to its own end.
So they started in again on al-Nashiri, inflicting new barbarous routines. He was stripped and stuffed into a small box for days. He was repeatedly slapped and insulted, called a “sissy” and told that his mother was going to be raped. He was forced to stand against a wall covered in burlap, as his head was slammed against it. At another black site, al-Nashiri had a black hood lowered over his head, while his tormenters told him that he was going to be killed as they prodded him with a pistol and revved a cordless power drill near his ear. When al-Nashiri attempted to protest his abusive treatment by going on a brief hunger strike, his captors shackled his hands to his feet “so that his head was lower than his torso” and fed him rectally, by “infusing [Ensure liquid protein] into Nashiri,” according to the CIA’s own cables. By the time they were done with him, al-Nashiri was a broken man. According to Dr. Sondra Crosby, a former Naval Reserve medic and professor of public health at Boston University who evaluated al-Nashiri, “He is irreversibly damaged by torture that was unusually cruel and designed to break him. In my over 20 years of experience treating torture victims from around the world, including Syria, Iraq, and the Democratic Republic of Congo, Mr. al-Nashiri presents as one of the most severely traumatized individuals I have ever seen.”
The breaking of al-Nashiri was taped. So were the fruitless interrogations. The tapes were evidence of a crime. Rumors circulated about them. The 9/11 commission asked if there were tapes. In 2003, lawyers for Zakaria Moussaoui asked for tapes or transcripts of interrogations. In 2005, the Senate Judiciary Committee demanded that the CIA turn over any tapes of torture or interrogations. Later that same year, federal judge Leonie Brinkema repeatedly instructed the CIA to produce any tapes in its possession. The ACLU filed a FOIA request demanding that any tapes be preserved and released.
As the demands for disclosure increased, the tapes were abruptly destroyed, even though a federal court had ordered their preservation. The person who destroyed them was present while al-Nashiri was being tortured. That person was Gina Haspel.
Haspel told Dianne Feinstein during her confirmation hearing to run the CIA that she wasn’t on the tapes. But she didn’t say, as the cast of Hamilton might put it, that she was in the room where it happened.
For 20 years now, Haspel–who has hidden behind redactions and code names–has denied, deflected, and dodged questions about her role in the CIA’s torture gulags and in the destruction of the incriminating tapes. She has been fortunate in her inquisitors–none of whom wanted to probe too deeply–from the hapless Feinstein to the inept prosecutor John Durham (who just got his ass handed to him by a DC jury in a Russiagate case), who investigated the destruction of the tapes and brought no charges.
For all these years, Haspel has never apologized, never copped to crossing any moral or legal lines. Her only regret is that the torture program was exposed, and that the disclosure harmed the reputation of the Agency. “While I won’t condemn those that made these hard calls, and I have noted the valuable intelligence collected, the program ultimately did damage to our officers and our standing in the world,” Haspel wrote to Mark Warner in 2018.
As for her own role, the most Haspel has ever said is that she “would refuse to undertake any proposed activity that was contrary to my moral and ethical values” – “moral and ethical values” which proved flexible enough to remain unruffled by simulated drowning, physical battery, and anal rape.
Meanwhile, al-Nashiri sits in a cell in Guantanamo, knowing that even if he eventually wins his case he will likely never be released and his torturers will never be brought to justice.
Jeffrey St. Clair is editor of CounterPunch. His most recent books are Bernie and the Sandernistas: Field Notes From a Failed Revolution and The Big Heat: Earth on the Brink (with Joshua Frank) He can be reached at: sitka@comcast.net or on Twitter @JeffreyStClair3.
https://www.counterpunch.org/2022/06/12/the-spy-in-the-torture-chamber/
Geen opmerkingen:
Een reactie posten