CIA report: Controversial techniques used by interogators

CIA report: Controversial techniques used by interrogators
Detainees subjected to waterboarding as well as fake executions and threats to kill prisoners' families


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Mark Tran
guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 25 August 2009 11.08 BST
Article history
A detainee from Afghanistan is carried on a stretcher before being interrogated by military officials at Guantánamo Bay. Photograph: Lynne Sladky/AP
A 2004 internal CIA report into allegations of abuse by agents during interrogations has been released after a long legal fight by civil liberty groups. Here is a summary of the some of the controversial techniques used by interrogators.
Waterboarding
Agency interrogators continuously applied large volumes of water to a cloth that covered the detainee's mouth and nose. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the mastermind behind the 9/11 attacks, was waterboarded 183 times. Abu Zubaydah, the first prisoner questioned in the CIA's overseas detention programme in August 2002, was waterboarded at least 83 times.
Brush
An interrogator scraped Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, a senior al-Qaida member, with the kind of stiff brush used to clear stubborn dirt from a bath. Interrogators also stood on his shackles. Nashiri was cut and bruised.
Threats
An Arabic speaker posing as an agent of a Middle Eastern security force told Nashiri his captors could kidnap his mother and other family members. The threat was intended to make him believe that his relatives would be sexually abused in front on him. Another interrogator told Khalid Sheikh Mohammed that his captors would kill his children if another terrorist attack hit the US.
Smoke in the face
An interrogator told investigators he blew tobacco smoke into detainees' faces in order to make them sick and vomit.
Pressure points
Interrogators pressed their fingers into a detainee's carotid artery to constrict the flow of blood to his brain until he began to lose consciousness. The process was repeated three times.
Fake execution
Interrogators fired a handgun outside a prisoner's cell while agents screamed and yelled. "When the guards moved the detainee from the interrogation room, they passed a guard who was dressed as a hooded detainee, lying motionless on the ground, and made to appear as if he had been shot to death," the report reads. A CIA officer later said the show was "transparently a ruse" and was thus ineffective. However, the report states that one detainee "sang like a bird" after witnessing the "body".
Assault
The report says a CIA contractor beat a prisoner with a large metal torch during June 2003 interrogation sessions. The prisoner, who had turned himself in at the urging of a local leader, died in custody four days after his capture. In July 2003, a CIA officer hit a teacher at an Afghanistan religious school when the officer was seeking information about a bomb that killed eight border guards. The report states that the teacher "smiled and laughed inappropriately", leading the CIA officer to strike him with the butt of his rifle and knee him in the torso several times, all in front of 200 students. The teacher was not seriously hurt.
Use of cold
A detainee was left in a cold room, shackled and naked. Cold showers were also used.
Nappies
An addendum to the report indicates that CIA officers were authorised to force detainees to wear nappies for up to three days on end. The unclassified portions of the report do not indicate whether the technique was actually used.
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