Black Site by Philip Mudd

Author:Philip Mudd
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Liveright
Published: 2019-06-03T16:00:00+00:00

Despite its later notoriety, waterboarding was not the most debated tactic at that time. During the approval process for the Program, and during subsequent exchanges with officials at the Department of Justice and the Bush White House, the tactic that led senior Administration officials to pause was more personal: nudity for prisoners. “It was the image, not the science,” said one senior official, recollecting White House rejection of nudity as an interrogation measure. Most attribute the opposition as an indication not that the tactic was particularly more objectionable than others but that those who objected were making decisions based on sentiment.

Not all the techniques that were discussed in Washington became reality, partly because the interrogators didn’t want them or feel they needed them. Earlier, at the outset of the program, the Agency had declined to use a few authorized techniques. Prisoners talked to the Red Cross about being held in what were called “confinement boxes,” designed to stress a prisoner by holding him in a box small enough that he couldn’t stretch. One early technique under consideration, for example, was adding harmless snakes and insects to the boxes, particularly for prisoners who showed unusual fear of them. One of the administrators of the Program reflects that the reasons for rejecting the technique weren’t all philosophical. “We didn’t want to clean up the mess from the crushed bugs,” he later said. It wasn’t clear that the insect ban was Agency-driven; others remember using insects as an interrogation technique as one of the options the White House took off the final list, despite the DoJ authorization of the technique as legal.

The Agency also never employed mock burial as an interrogation technique, despite the fact that they thought it would meet with DoJ approval. All along in the Program, its designers adhered to the practice of ensuring that techniques weren’t revealed so that prisoners didn’t know what awaited them. In this case, the idea would have been to reinforce in the prisoner’s mind this theme of helplessness. “There is a way out,” the message always was. “But it has to be through us.”

The legal basis for the Program was in place. The first formal CIA cable authorizing this suite of techniques was sent in August 2002 to that initial black site, where interrogators were ready for Abu Zubaydah. Not all the techniques were on the table; with his leg continuing to heal, for example, the interrogators wouldn’t use the stress position technique because of the potential to aggravate his injury. The other methods, though, were in play, including the most aggressive measure the Agency ever used: waterboarding.

* Later reports suggested that rectal rehydration—inserting fluids into a detainee via a rectal tube—was an interrogation tactic. CIA officers maintain that this was a medical procedure. Those CIA managers who commented on this controversy, up and down the CIA chain of command, were not aware of this procedure before they heard about it in media reports. Their view, generally, is that had they known of it

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