by JEFFREY ST. CLAIR
On the first anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, Pakistani ISI (Inter-Services Intelligence) forces raided several houses in Karachi, hunting for suspected members of Al Qaeda. In one of the incursions, the Pakistanis captured a young Yemeni man named Ramzi bin Al-Shibh. Three days later, the Pakistanis turned Bin al-Shibh and Hassan bin Attash, a 17-year-old Saudi, over to the CIA, who renditioned the pair into what was known as the Dark Prison outside Kabul, where, according to an account Bin al-Shibh later gave to the International Red Cross, he was stripped of his clothes, denied food and water and kept shackled from the ceiling in a painful position for the next three days while loud music was blasted into his cell.
This was just the opening act in the prolonged torture of Ramzi Bin al-Shibh that took him to torture chambers in at least seven different countries in four years– Afghanistan, Jordan, Morocco, Poland, Gitmo, Romania, and Lithuania–and left Bin al-Shibh a broken man, psychologically shattered and physically depleted.
After four days in the Dark Prison, al-Shihb was apparently transferred to the Wadi Sir site in Amman, Jordan, where he was interrogated and tortured by the GID (Jordanian intelligence). According to a Human Rights Watch report, the torture included “electric shocks, long periods of sleep deprivation, forced nakedness and being made to sit on sticks and bottles.”
From Jordan, Bin al-Shihb was flown to Morocco, where he was held in a CIA-financed prison near Rabat for the next five months and regularly interrogated by both the CIA and Moroccan intelligence. Many of these sessions were recorded, and the tapes sent back to Langley. In 2005, the CIA ordered all of the interrogation tapes of “high-level detainees” destroyed, but two years later two videotapes and an audio tape of Bin al-Shihb’s interrogation were discovered under a desk in the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center. The Agency had twice told a federal judge that no tapes of Bin al-Shihb’s interrogation existed.
Part of the CIA’s Operation Greystone, which authorized the Agency to hold suspected terrorists in secret prisons and rendition them back and forth to other countries, the Moroccan black site was a kind of way station, where prisoners could be warehoused and interrogated, then shuttled to another site. Bin al-Shibh, who was already beginning to show signs of extreme mental distress, was kept in the Moroccan prison for five months before being shipped to Poland. He would return here two more times in the following four years. Bin al-Shihb’s psychological instability would deteriorate with each new stop in the Agency’s torture archipelago. People the CIA considered “high-value detainees” were kept on the move, from one black site to another, in large part to keep them out of reach of the US courts and international human rights investigators, a shell game with human beings. By the time Bin al-Shihb had been captured and hidden away, our old friend the late Michael Ratner and the Center for Constitutional Rights had already filed a federal lawsuit challenging the legality of the “secret prison” at Guantánamo.
By the CIA’s own account, Bin al-Shibh had been one of their most cooperative detainees, talking freely. The videotapes from Morocco show calmly him answering questions while sitting at a desk. One former interrogator derisively described Bin al-Shihb as “folding like a wet suit.” In the 9-11 Commission Report, Bin al-Shihb’s interrogation is cited 119 times. Only Khalid Sheikh Mohammed is referenced more often.
Nevertheless, while Bin al-Shibh was detained in Rabat, the CIA was busy planning a much more aggressive approach to extract information from him, a routine of torture and abuse that would become the model for the Agency’s “enhanced interrogation techniques.” These methods were designed by psychologists like Bruce Jessen and James Mitchell, who had taken oaths to heal minds and then capitalized ($81 million in payments from the CIA) on fracturing them.
The rough stuff would begin in February 2003 near Szymany, Poland at a CIA black prison known as Detention Site Blue, where he was held for four months. But Bin al-Shihb had nothing left to give. He’d spilled all he knew. More than that he knew, most likely, in an attempt to appease his inquisitors. From here on, the point of his torture would be the torture itself. It would end up ruining his mind.
After Bin al-Shihb arrived in Poland, now in the custody of the CIA itself, he was once again stripped naked, and then placed in a diaper. His hands and feet were chained to the ceiling with, according to the CIA’s own wording, his “arms outstretched over his head (with his feet firmly on the floor and not allowed to support his weight with his arms).” He was kept in a white room, flooded with bright white lights. After one of the bulbs blew out, one of the interrogators saw Bin al-Shibh flinch and cower in the corner of the room. In response, the torturers began to keep Bin al-Shihb in the dark and blast music into the room for 72 hours straight. The temperature of the room was kept cold. His head and face were shaved. For the first three or four weeks, he was kept on a liquid diet and denied any solid food. The CIA called this technique “sensory dislocation.”
He was interrogated often, often multiple times a day. The same questions were asked over and over again, often interrupted by Bin al-Shihb being sprayed with ice-cold water from a house. Between the questioning, Bin al-Shihb was slapped repeatedly in the face and the abdomen. He was walled, kept in cramped stress positions and waterboarded. Bin al-Shibh would be chained for days, and not permitted to even use the toilet, so he was forced to stand and sleep in his own urine and feces and then hosed down while being taunted by the guards. He was ordered to call his torturers “Sir.” When he failed to do so, he would be anally raped with rectal hydrations (EiTs). His interrogators noted that the procedures were used for “behavior adjustment,” when Bin al-Shibh showed his interrogators a lack of respect. The torture went on for five months. What was the goal of this repeated abuse? According to the CIA’s Inspector General, Bin al-Shibh’s treatment was “designed to psychologically ‘dislocate’ the detainee, maximizing his feeling of vulnerability and helplessness, and reduce or eliminate his will to resist.” In fact, it seems to have done the opposite. While cooperative in the early months of his detention, Bin al-Shibh became, according to CIA interrogators, increasingly defiant. He also seemed to be going insane. He was hallucinating, talking nonsense, and acting paranoid. And who could blame him?
Counterpunch for more