GUANTANAMO BAY, Cuba – A CIA psychologist who invaded a prisoner accused of plotting to bomb the USS Cole testified this week that the Saudi man broke down quickly and became so susceptible that he would crawl into a cramped chest even before his guards ordered to enter.
Psychologist James E. Mitchell also told a military judge that prisoner Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri was so emaciated that Dr. Mitchell and his interrogation partner, John Bruce Jessen, stopped taking him after the third secret session. site in Thailand in 2002 because they feared he might be hurt.
In this case, they put it in a neck bracket and fastened it to a cart that served as a board. But when the board was tilted up to allow him to breathe after a “40-second spill,” the 5-foot, £ 5 and £ 120 prisoner nearly slipped off the floor straps, Dr Mitchell said.
“He was snoring and blowing water out of his nose,” Dr. Mitchell testified. A former career military psychologist who said he learned the techniques at Air Force Survival School, Dr. Mitchell said the water board episodes were so long ago he can’t remember if the prisoner really cried.
Mr Nashiri’s lawyers questioned Dr Mitchell on Monday and Tuesday about what had happened for several weeks at the black facility in November 2002. His testimony was intended to offer a narrative of what might have been there were videotapes that top CIA leaders destroyed at a time when the Senate Intelligence Committee was investigating the activities of black sites.
Mr Nashiri, who was captured in Dubai in 2002, is accused of organizing the Qaeda suicide bombing of Cole near Yemen in 2000, which killed 17 American sailors. His case is still in pre-trial proceedings, and his lawyers are calling witnesses in long-standing attempts to exclude government evidence from his possible death sentence trial. They say some of the evidence in the case is infected with torture or other misconduct in the United States.
No solutions to any of the key issues are expected soon. In his testimony, Dr. Mitchell described his attitude toward the defendant – to make him answer questions during questioning – as strictly monitored by CIA doctors and authorized by attorneys at the Department of Justice.
Discussing the detention box in which psychologists held some prisoners, Dr. Mitchell said he and Dr. Jason built it with the help of CIA officials to duplicate the box that was used to train certain officers. of the Air Force to survive capture and interrogation by the enemy.
Initially, security had to order the Saudi prisoner to enter the box, but over time, the prisoner “liked being in the box,” Dr. Mitchell said. “He will come in himself and close it.”
Mr Nashiri was absent from the hearing voluntarily and therefore did not hear the description of his detention in a rough cell, naked and under bright lights – with the box held there as well. Nor did he see a replica of the box his Pentagon-paid security team built based on specifications cited in a Senate study of the CIA’s blackmail program.
Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri’s defense attorneys provided this photo in a replica that was made from a small box where Mr. Nashiri was locked up on a black CIA website.
“When I heard him talk, I imagined I was training a dog in a crate and I was sick,” said Annie W. Morgan, a former Air Force defense attorney who serves on Mr. Nashiri’s legal team. “This was the goal of the program: to create a sense of learned helplessness and to become completely dependent and subordinate to its captors.”
Dr. Mitchell also described some of the abuses Mr. Nashiri suffered later in 2002 after the psychologist handed over the detainees in Afghanistan and the detention of the CIA chief investigator at the next black facility. For Mr Nashiri, this was the fourth stop in what will become a four-year odyssey of the CIA’s detention across 10 secret overseas sites.
The episodes described by Dr. Mitchell include:
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A member of the interrogation team used a belt to tie Mr. Nashiri’s hands behind his back and lift him from behind to “on his toes,” Dr. Mitchell said. The prisoner shouted, and Dr. Mitchell said he was protesting, fearing that Mr. Nashiri’s shoulders would be dislocated. The treatment continued.
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The guards forced the chained Mr. Nashiri to kneel, then bent him back with a broomstick placed behind the prisoner’s knees.
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The chief investigator, allegedly seeking to train Mr. Nashiri to address him as “sir,” used a stiff brush to make a cold water bath for Mr. Nashiri, then scraped the brush from the prisoner’s anus to his face and mouth. mu.
Dr Mitchell said he had only learned in recent days – from prosecutors in the case – that Mr Nashiri had undergone “rectal nutrition”, a procedure which he said was carried out mainly by CIA doctors for medical reasons, except when the chief investigator in Afghanistan chose to use it.
The Senate Intelligence Report on the Program, released in 2014, reveals the agency’s medical staff’s practice of inserting a tube into the rectum of a CIA prisoner who refuses to eat or drink, and then pouring liquid or pureed food into the detainee. . Prisoners and their lawyers describe the procedure as rape. Majid Khan, Qaeda’s courier, told the court last year that when he was forced to undergo the procedure, the CIA used “green garden hoses.”
Dr Mitchell also briefly mentioned that he had learned how the Chief Investigator had questioned Mr Nashiri with an electric drill and a pistol in the period after he had been flooded. Dr Mitchell said he had not witnessed the behavior, but had reported it to CIA headquarters, which had the inspector general investigate and uncover the misconduct.
Dr. Mitchell describes the abuse as unnecessary and disapproving. After Mr Nashiri was taken away with water and subjected to other “physical coercion”, including hitting a wall and being held in a detention cell, he began answering questions about impending attacks, Dr Mitchell said.
Dr Mitchell has testified that he will visit black sites where Mr Nashiri was detained during his four years in the CIA – including a secret site where he was held at Guantánamo Bay in 2003 and 2004 – to boost co-operation. the prisoner with those who interrogate him. He would remind Mr Nashiri, he said, that he did not want to go back to “hard times”, a hint of an era of “intensified interrogations”.
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