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    The Guardian view on Guantánamo Bay: betraying the victims of terrorism too | Editorial

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    There is no neat exit point from grief. Each anniversary, each life event, each addition to or loss from the family, can bring renewed pain to the bereaved. For relatives of the almost 3,000 killed in the terror attacks on September 11, 2001, that suffering has been compounded by the lack of accountability for their deaths.This week, the US announced that it had reached a plea deal with Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, described as the attack’s architect, and two accomplices, Walid Muhammad Salih Mubarak Bin ‘Attash, and Mustafa Ahmed Adam al-Hawsawi. They will avoid the death penalty, instead receiving life sentences in exchange for pleading guilty to all the offences with which they were charged. Negotiations continue with two more men. All have been in US custody since 2002, and are held at Guantánamo Bay, in Cuba. For many relatives, there is anger that there will be no trial, and in some cases that the men will not be executed. But for others there is some relief that after 23 years there is a kind of conclusion to the case, however partial and unsatisfactory.Last year, Fionnuala Ní Aoláin, the first UN rights investigator to be allowed to visit since the camp’s establishment, described its use of torture as “a betrayal of the rights of victims” of terrorism, as well as breaching the rights of those who had spent more than two decades in indefinite detention. Torture was not merely the standard operating procedure at Guantánamo Bay. It was its raison d’etre. Men were taken there because it lay outside the rule of law. The abuse, however, made it essentially impossible to proceed with material derived from their interrogations, even under the conditions of a military tribunal rather than a criminal trial. Victims of torture lie so that it will stop. This week’s plea deals are not a vindication of the site’s existence: quite the opposite. Over a decade of pretrial hearings have been absorbed by litigating torture, rather than establishing responsibility for terrorism.While conditions have improved, Prof Ní Aoláin, then the special rapporteur on human rights and counter-terrorism, wrote that detainees were still subject to “cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment”, in addition to living with the “unrelenting harms” from previous abuses. Several have killed themselves; others have been left with severe mental illness.Guantánamo Bay should never have been opened. This was the conclusion not only of human rights groups and lawyers, but of the US general tasked with setting up the detention camp, Michael Lehnert. Even without considering the moral and legal case, he – like others – quickly concluded that many detainees had little intelligence value, and insufficient evidence linking them to war crimes. Of the hundreds kept there, only 18 have been charged with a crime. In 2009, Barack Obama, then US president, vowed to shut the facility within a year. But despite releases and transfers, around 30 men are still held, at a cost of around $14m each annually.The conclusion of a legal process – however inadequate – means that for some, the detention camp will become more akin to a prison. But as Maj Gen Lehnert wrote almost a decade ago, it is hard to overstate the damage caused by its continuing existence. Repressive governments use it to deflect attacks on their own policies; violent extremists employ it as a recruiting tool. As long as it remains open, the place “where due process goes to die” will remain a stain upon the US. More

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      I survived Guantánamo. Why is it still open 21 years later? | Mansoor Adayfi

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      I survived Guantánamo. Why is it still open 21 years later?Mansoor AdayfiA generation was born and came of age since the prison opened. Four US presidents have served. Yet 35 men remain there The US prison at Guantánamo Bay opened 21 years ago this Wednesday. For 21 years, the extrajudicial detention facility has held a total of 779 men between eight known camps. In two decades, Guantánamo grew from a small, makeshift camp of chainlink cages into a maximum-security facility of cement bunker-like structures that costs close to $540m a year to operate.Twenty-one years is a long time – a generation was born and came of age in that time. Four American presidents have served. The World Trade Center was rebuilt.During that time, the US military, the CIA and other intelligence agencies experimented with torture and other human rights violations. Soldiers and even leaders committed war crimes. The US Congress researched, wrote and released a report documenting torture, abuse and inhumane treatment of prisoners at Guantánamo and at black sites around the world, while also making it impossible to close Guantánamo.Of those 779 prisoners held at Guantánamo, we know that nine died there; 706 have been released or transferred out; 20 have been recommended for transfer but remain there; 12 have been charged with crimes; two have been convicted; and three will be held in indefinite law-of-war detention until someone demands their release.I was 19 when I was sent to Guantánamo, I arrived on 9 February 2002, blindfolded, hooded, shackled, beaten. When soldiers removed my hood, all I saw were cages filled with orange figures. I had been tortured. I was lost and afraid and confused. I didn’t know where I was or why I had been taken there. I didn’t know how long I would be imprisoned or what would happen to me. No one knew where I was. I was given a number and became suspended between life and death.I didn’t know a lot about America. I knew it was supposed to be a land of laws and opportunity. Everyone wanted to live there. We all believed our detention would be short. We hadn’t done anything. They couldn’t keep us long without someone caring. I never could have imagined that I would spend eight years in solitary confinement, that I would be held for 15 years and released without ever being charged with a crime.I turned 40 recently, and even though I am a grown man I still feel like the 19-year-old who first arrived at Guantánamo. In one sense, I came of age there – learning how to protest my detention, how to use my body to hunger strike, how to resist. I think about my time there a lot. While my childhood friends went to university, married, got jobs and began their lives, I fought prison guards who harassed me while I tried to pray.In Guantánamo’s early days, when it was just an undeveloped prison, a baby really, we all had questions: when would we be released? Why were interrogations getting worse? Why didn’t anyone believe what we told them? But we weren’t the only ones with questions. Young guards wanted to know what they were doing there, who we were, and why some leaders said we were the “worst of the worst” terrorists while other leaders called us nobodies or dirt farmers.I think Guantánamo itself had the same questions. I think Guantánamo wanted to know what kind of place it would become, how long it would be used, if it would be useful.We all waited for those answers, year after year, as we grew older. I grew a beard and my hair turned gray. Guantánamo rusted, peeled, decayed; Camp X-Ray, the first camp, became overgrown with weeds and grass. Guards rotated out and so did camp leaders. Guards who were kind to us were often demoted or punished or left Guantánamo confused about the conflict between their official duty and what they knew was right and wrong. General Miller, the architect of what the US calls “enhanced interrogation” and everyone else calls torture, went to Iraq and Abu Ghraib. Some prisoners were released. Some – like Yassir (21 years old), Ali (26), and Mani (30) – died violently and mysteriously in custody.The years passed like chapters in a book, and with each new chapter we thought our questions would be answered or at least that the chapters would change. There were new beginnings and new phases, but the story remained the same: interrogations continued. So did our inhumane treatment and religious harassment.Each chapter grew darker as we lost touch with the stories of our lives before Guantánamo. When we were taken to Guantánamo, we were fathers, sons, brothers, and husbands; we had families, dreams, and lives in the outside world. But at Guantánamo we were just numbers, animals in cages, totally cut off from the world we knew; we were caught in an endless loop of interrogations trying to get us to admit that we were al-Qaeda or Taliban fighters. We lived Guantánamo’s lawlessness and abuses, we watched Guantánamo grow and evolve, while our story remained stuck.We became Guantánamo and so did our stories. We resisted and protested our arbitrary and indefinite detention, we fought and went on hunger strikes to make the world hear us, see our suffering, and know our humanity. We also had moments of happiness, creativity, and brotherhood. We sang, danced, joked and laughed. We created art. We became brothers and friends, even with some of the guards and camp staff who treated us like we were human. We gradually lost touch with our old selves until Guantánamo became our life, our world, our only story.As Guantánamo grew older, stronger, and more permanent, we grew older, too, but weaker, more fragile, still bound within its cages. We heard that some people around the world protested our imprisonment and our torture and campaigned to close Guantánamo. That gave us hope and made us feel that we had not been forgotten. But others, like politicians outside of Guantánamo, learned to use the prison to create their own false stories – stories that feasted on us to create fear. They kept Guantánamo open.Toward the end of my time, Guantánamo had grown, in some respects, more mature and more open. We had changed too; we had reconnected with the outside world. We tried to reclaim those parts of ourselves that had been taken away and lost. I took classes and created art. I learned English and wrote stories about Guantánamo. After 15 years, I worried that I wouldn’t survive in the world once I left. I had grown up there and become a man. Guantánamo is what I knew. It’s where my friends were.I thought that by leaving, I would finally be able to write new chapters, ones that changed and had a good ending. I would end the story the way I wanted to: Guantánamo would become just a memory; I would move on, go to school, get married, start my life. But the prison didn’t want to let go. It surprised me with a new story.Like me, hundreds of men have been released from Guantánamo. Some went home to their countries and to their families. Many were sent to places they don’t know – Uruguay, Kazakhstan, Slovakia. I was sent to Serbia, where I didn’t have friends or family and didn’t speak the language. We have tried to create our own stories in these new places, ones without Guantánamo. But Guantánamo won’t let us go. We live with the stigma of having been held there.Thirty-five men remain there. President Biden has quietly worked to wind down the prison camp, but without cooperation from the US Congress, Guantánamo will remain open.For years now, former prisoners, activists, lawyers and journalists have been working to write Guantánamo’s final chapter, one that ends with justice, accountability, reconciliation, and the closure of the prison. Let’s make that happen, so that in one year, we can write a new story about life after Guantánamo.
      Mansoor Adayfi is an artist, advocate, and former Guantánamo prisoner, released in 2016 after being detained without charge or trial for more than 15 years. He is the author of the memoir Don’t Forget Us Here: Lost and Found at Guantánamo
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      The Guardian view on CIA torture, two decades on: we need the truth | Editorial

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      The Guardian view on CIA torture, two decades on: we need the truthEditorialThe systematic brutalisation of detainees was pointless as well as cruel. An honest reckoning is long overdue Twenty years ago, in the wake of the September 11 terror attacks, the CIA established an international torture programme “rendering” people to secret detention facilities around the world. The full horror of what took place in these black sites is still emerging.We already know of mock executions and sexual violence; of a detainee waterboarded 83 times in a month; of a man dying during an interrogation and another of hypothermia after being left almost naked on a bare concrete floor – on top of the regular use of pain, humiliation and sleep deprivation. This week, we learned that Ammar al-Baluchi suffered brain damage when he was repeatedly slammed against a plywood wall by trainee interrogators using him as a teaching prop. They queued up to hit his head so that the instructor “could certify them on their ability to use the technique”.The details emerged in a damning report written by the CIA’s own inspector general in 2008, but only now released following a court filing. The “war on terror” became an end that was used to justify any means – but never openly. Torture was rebranded as “enhanced interrogation techniques”. Interrogators sought assurances that a detainee would “remain in isolation and incommunicado for the remainder of his life” before they started work. The programme was pointless as well as brutal. The inspector general noted that the detainee lied to make the torture stop – in line with the 2014 Senate intelligence committee report that found that interrogations frequently produced false testimony (while non-coercive methods elicited useful information). At least 26 of 119 detainees were wrongly held in the first place.Mr Baluchi now faces the death penalty as one of five men at Guantanamo Bay charged with participation in the September 11 plot. The case has been in pre-trial hearings for 10 years, largely due to disputes over the admissibility of testimony obtained after torture. Last week, another Guantanamo detainee – Mohammad Ahmad al-Qahtani, who was suspected of planning to join the plot – was repatriated to Saudi Arabia for mental health treatment. The US dropped plans to try him after concluding he had been tortured at the facility.Despite our growing knowledge, we are still very far from a full acknowledgement of what took place – let alone accountability for it. The supreme court recently blocked two psychologists who designed the programme from being called in a case in Poland, where one of the black sites was located. The 2014 Senate report has never been released in full, though there are now renewed calls for its publication. In the UK, parliament’s intelligence and security committee produced damning reports on British involvement in kidnap and torture in 2018, but the government refused to launch a judge-led inquiry into UK complicity in the programme.On Tuesday, the UN special rapporteur on the promotion and protection of human rights while countering terrorism issued a scathing report on the failure to address the atrocities. “Not a single man who was rendered across borders, tortured, arbitrarily detained, separated from family has received an adequate remedy,” Fionnuala Ní Aoláin said. “Many who were returned home continue to live with long-term social and psychological trauma. No one was held accountable for systematic practices of torture and rendition.” This is not only about an injustice to individuals. The rapporteur suggests that the refusal to acknowledge what happened has helped create an environment in which there appears to be impunity for states conducting mass secret detention. An honest reckoning would help to debunk the dangerous myth that torture works and claims that national security requires unfettered powers used in secrecy. It is an essential part of ensuring such crimes are not committed again.TopicsCIAOpinionTortureGuantánamo BayCIA torture reportUS SenateUS politicsRenditioneditorialsReuse this content More

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      The CIA lied to justify torturing one prisoner after 9/11. 20 years later, his story is still shrouded in secrecy

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      The CIA lied to justify torturing one prisoner after 9/11. 20 years later, his story is still shrouded in secrecy Calls mount for release of full Senate report on the US torture of Abu Zubaydah to counter a narrative too many Americans still believe – that torture worksOn the morning of 6 October the nine justices of the US supreme court filed into their wood-paneled courtroom in Washington to hear arguments in a dispute between the US government and Abu Zubaydah, a Guantánamo prisoner who has been held incommunicado and without charge for the past 20 years.A government lawyer addressed the panel, arguing on grounds of “state secrets” that Zubaydah should be blocked from calling two CIA contractors to testify about the brutal interrogations they put him through at a hidden black site in Poland. Within minutes of his opening remarks, the lawyer was interrupted by Amy Coney Barrett, one of the rightwing justices appointed to the court by Donald Trump.Barrett wanted to know what the government would do were the contractors to give evidence before a domestic US court about how they had “waterboarded” Zubaydah at least 83 times, beat him against a wall, hung him by his hands from cell bars and entombed him naked in a coffin-sized box for 266 hours. “You know,” she said, “the evidence of how he was treated and his torture.”“Torture.”Barrett said the word almost nonchalantly, but its significance ricocheted around the courtroom and far beyond. By using the word she had effectively acknowledged that what was done by the CIA to Zubaydah, and to at least 39 other “war on terror” detainees in the wake of 9/11, was a crime under US law.After Barrett uttered the word the floodgates were opened. “Torture” echoed around the nation’s highest court 20 times that day, pronounced by Barrett six times and once by another of Trump’s conservative nominees, Neil Gorsuch, with liberal justices Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan also piling in.Supreme Court hearing, 6 October 2021Justices Amy Coney Barrett and Neil Gorsuch use the word “torture” in the Abu Zubaydah hearingSorry your browser does not support audio – but you can download here and listen https://audio.guim.co.uk/2020/05/05-61553-gnl.fw.200505.jf.ch7DW.mp300:00:0000:00:41The flurry of plain speaking by justices on both ideological wings of the court amazed observers of America’s long history of duplicity and evasion on this subject. “The way the supreme court justices used the word ‘torture’ was remarkable,” Andrea Prasow, a lawyer and advocate working to hold the US accountable for its counterterrorism abuses, told the Guardian. “You could feel the possibility that the ground is shifting.”Prasow was astonished a second time three weeks later when Majid Khan, a former al-Qaida courier also held in Guantánamo, became the first person to speak openly in court about the torture he suffered at a CIA black site.Khan’s description of being waterboarded, held in the nude and chained to the ceiling to the point that he began to hallucinate was so overpowering that seven of the eight members of his military jury wrote a letter pleading for clemency for him, saying his treatment was a “stain on the moral fiber of America”.The ground does appear to be shifting, and as it does attention is once again falling on one of the great unfinished businesses of the 21st century: the US torture program. In the panicky aftermath of 9/11, when the world seemed to be imploding, the CIA took the view that the ends – the search for actionable intelligence to thwart further terrorist attacks – justified any means.With the enthusiastic blessing of the justice department and George W Bush’s White House, the CIA abandoned American values and violated international and US laws by adopting callous cruelties that they consciously copied from the enemy.They took one prisoner, Abu Zubaydah, and made him their experimental guinea pig. On Zubaydah’s back they built an entire edifice of torture – “enhanced interrogation techniques” as the bloodless euphemism went – that in turn was founded upon a mountain of lies. When the worst of the torture was completed, to spare themselves from possible prosecution the CIA insisted that Zubaydah remain “in isolation and incommunicado for the remainder of his life”.“The torture program was designed for only one person – they gave him a name and that name was Abu Zubaydah,” Mark Denbeaux, Zubaydah’s lead habeas lawyer, told the Guardian. “After they tortured him, they demanded that he be held incommunicado forever so that his story could never be told. Since that moment the only people he has ever spoken to are his torturers, his jailers, and his lawyers, including me.”Senate report on CIA torture claims spy agency lied about ‘ineffective’ programRead moreTwenty years after Zubaydah was waterboarded, slammed repeatedly against a wall, sleep-deprived, face slapped, chained in painful stress positions, hosed with freezing water, stripped naked, and blasted with deafening noise, his story still has not fully been told. In 2014 the Senate intelligence committee released a heavily redacted, 500-page executive summary of its seven-year investigation into the torture program, generating headlines around the world and leading Barack Obama to conclude that “these harsh methods were not only inconsistent with our values, they did not serve our national security”.Yet at the insistence of the CIA the full report from which the summary was drawn remains under lock and key to this day. All three volumes of it. All more than 6,700 pages. All 38,000 footnotes. All the detail distilled from 6.2m pages of classified CIA documents.The persistent refusal to release the full Senate torture report has left a black hole at the centre of one of the most shameful episodes in US history. Now, with the T-word being heard even in the hallowed halls of the US supreme court, renewed calls are being made for the report to be published so that this sorry chapter can finally be closed.Several of the individuals most closely involved in the battle for the truth over Abu Zubaydah’s treatment have told the Guardian that 20 years is long enough. It is time for the American people to be told the full unadulterated facts about what was done in their name.“More than seven years after the completion of the torture investigation, it remains critically important that the public see the full report,” said Ron Wyden, the Democratic senator from Oregon who was an important advocate for the Senate investigation and who played a critical role in ensuring that at least some of its findings have emerged into daylight.How the CIA tortured its detaineesRead moreWyden called for a full accounting of the CIA’s handling of detainees. He said a wealth of information still shrouded in secrecy would confirm that the torture program was ineffective – it simply didn’t work.“The withholding of the full report, and the redactions in the public executive summary, have hidden from the public the story of how the program was developed and operated. Understanding how all of this happened is important because it must never happen again.”Daniel Jones, the chief author of the US Senate report, said that now was the moment for its release. “The country is ready. It’s what you do in a transparent democracy: when you mess up you admit it and you move on as a better country. We’ve reached that point now.”Abu Zubaydah, 50, (actual name Zayn al-Abidin Muhammad Husayn) is a Saudi-born Palestinian who was one of the CIA’s “high-value” targets in the wake of 9/11. He was captured in Faisalabad, Pakistan, on 28 March 2002 in a raid in which he was shot several times including in the thigh and groin. He later lost his left eye while in US custody in unexplained circumstances.John Kiriakou, a former CIA counter-terrorism officer, was a leading member of the team that seized Zubaydah, sitting guard at the prisoner’s bedside after the raid. Though Kiriakou did not participate in the prisoner’s subsequent interrogations at secret black sites in Thailand, Poland, Lithuania and other countries, he continued to keep tabs on his captive.In December 2007, having by then left the CIA, Kiriakou gave an interview to NBC News in which he became the first former government official publicly to state that Zubaydah had been waterboarded – the process where a cloth is placed over a detainee’s face and water poured over it as a form of controlled drowning. Kiriakou declared that he had come to view the procedure as torture.Kiriakou’s comments marked the first chink in the wall of official silence surrounding the CIA’s abuses. The move displeased his former employers and he was made the subject of a leak inquiry that ended in a sentence of 23 months in a federal penitentiary – he is convinced as an act of revenge – ostensibly for having revealed the identity of a covert CIA agent to a journalist.Unbeknownst to him at the time, Kiriakou in fact gave erroneous information in his NBC News interview. He said Zubaydah had been waterboarded only once and that the detainee had instantly cracked, divulging good actionable intelligence in less than a minute.In fact, the prisoner was waterboarded not once but at least 83 times over more than a month. After the torture began in earnest at “detention site green” in Thailand in August 2002, the CIA gleaned no valuable information from Zubaydah whatsoever.Kiriakou told the Guardian that his remarks to NBC had been based on what he picked up at CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia. “This was all a lie and we didn’t know it was a lie until it was declassified in 2009. So on top of being illegal, unethical and immoral, it was also false.”To Kiriakou, the supreme court’s ease with the word “torture” 14 years after he used it for the first time on network television is “vindication that it was wrong”. He said he was dismayed that the CIA continues to cover up its “barbaric crimes” by resisting release of the full Senate report, likening the study to the defense department’s internal account of the Vietnam war that changed the course of history when it was leaked in 1971.“We knew a lot about what was happening in Vietnam but we didn’t have official government confirmation until Daniel Ellsberg released the Pentagon Papers. It’s the same here. We have had some testimony from torture victims but we don’t have official confirmation of what the CIA did from the CIA itself, and that’s what release of this report would do.”The lies to which Kiriakou fell foul were intrinsic to the torture program from its inception. Zubaydah was used as the prototype for a new type of “enhanced interrogation” that crossed the line into torture.CIA torture architect breaks silence to defend ‘enhanced interrogation’Read moreIn April 2002 a pair of psychologists, James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen, were brought on board by the CIA on contract to create the program. They based the plan partly on experiments on dogs that found if you hurt and humiliated the animals sufficiently, eventually they would stop resisting – “learned helplessness” as it was known in the trade. (At least in this regard the torture program proved successful – Zubaydah did reach such a place of helplessness. It got to the point that as soon as an interrogator snapped his fingers twice, the detainee would lie flat on the waterboard and wait supinely for the controlled drowning to begin.)The psychologists, whom the CIA paid more than $80m for their efforts, consciously modeled their interrogation methods on the so-called SERE training of American soldiers on how to resist torture were they to fall into enemy hands. The contractors openly adopted the enemy torture techniques, without irony, despite the fact that the methods were designed to extract propaganda statements from US prisoners of war and not accurate intelligence.Senior CIA officials knew that they faced an uphill battle in persuading the Department of Justice that what they planned to do was legal – after all torture was categorically prohibited under the 1949 Geneva Conventions that the US had ratified. So they presented the DoJ with a “psychological assessment” of Zubaydah justifying why he needed to be made to talk using aggressive interrogation methods, warning that “​countless more Americans may die unless we can persuade Zubaydah to tell us what he knows”.It was all a smorgasbord of lies. “The reasons they gave for why he had to be tortured were false and known to be false,” Denbeaux said.“The justice department was duped into approving the torture of a man who was never a member of al-Qaida. They said he was number two, three or four of al-Qaida – not true. They said he was part of 9/11 – laughable and not true. They said he was part of all al-Qaida operations around the world – totally untrue.”Denbeaux added that one of the most urgent arguments in favour of releasing the full Senate report was that it would expose the lies at the core of the program. “It would show in detail how the falsity was made up, and who in the CIA put these false facts together.”Zubaydah’s psychological profile was not the only aspect of the untruths that formed the building blocks of the torture program. The CIA was also misleading about the efficacy of “enhanced interrogation techniques”.Ali Soufan has personal knowledge of how distorted the official CIA account was. A former FBI special agent, he was one of the first US officials to interrogate Zubaydah at a black site.He did so using conventional interrogation methods that would be familiar to students of Law & Order. He learned everything he could about his subject, spoke in the prisoner’s own language (Arabic), built up a rapport with Zubaydah, and played mind games on him such as giving him the impression that the FBI knew much more about his activities than in fact they did.All without recourse to force, violence or humiliation. “We did not need torture to get information,” Soufan told the Guardian.Soufan and his FBI partner succeeded in securing Zubaydah’s cooperation and extracting significant intelligence from the prisoner, including the central role played by Khalid Sheikh Mohammed as the architect of 9/11. Even so, they were abruptly pulled off the job and replaced by the CIA contractors armed with a very different approach.Soufan watched aghast as CIA operatives, under the instruction of Mitchell and Jessen, began to torture the prisoner. “At the beginning it was mostly loud music,” Soufan said. “He was held naked in the cell. That shocked me at the time. It was stupid, why are we doing it, the guy is already giving information. And then it evolved, one step after another.”Starting at 11.50am on 4 August 2002, Zubaydah was tortured through a variety of methods, almost 24 hours a day, for 19 days without break. After a waterboarding session he was noted to have “involuntary leg, chest and arm spasms” and to be unable to communicate. On one occasion he became “completely unresponsive, with bubbles rising through his open, full mouth”.Given Zubaydah’s incommunicado status, he has never been allowed to recount his experiences directly to the American people. But over the years his lawyers have managed to put together notes in which the Guantánamo detainee describes his abuse.Excerpts of those notes, together with some of Zubaydah’s drawings that he sketched from memory in Guantánamo that illustrate his treatment at the CIA black sites, are being published by the Guardian. They amount to a harrowing account in Zubaydah’s own words and images of the relentless, round-the-clock, prolonged and illegal abuse he suffered.Soufan, who is now CEO of the Soufan Group, said the release of the full Senate report is essential to counter the CIA narrative, which he fears that too many Americans still believe – that torture works. “Most of the American public believe the Hollywood version: you beat someone up, they give you the information you want, you save lives.”Soufan added: “Release the full Senate report and you will see that the CIA shaped a false narrative. The torture did not work, it did not produce information that saved lives, it did hinder our counterterrorism operations and destroy our image and reputation around the world.”Soufan’s own experiences give some hope that the full Senate report might one day be made public. When his book on the war of terror, The Black Banners, was published in 2011 it was so heavily redacted by the CIA that he even had to black out any reference to himself including the words “I”, “me”, “our” and “we”.It took him a legal battle lasting nine years, but in 2020 he was finally able to bring out a declassified edition. Soufan hopes that the softening attitude of CIA chiefs towards his book bodes well for an eventual release of the Senate report.“The CIA is now a very different organization from what it was in 2002. The people who were directly involved in the torture program, they are all out and there is a new leadership who understand the impact of all this.”Kiriakou is more pessimistic about a CIA change of heart: “For the next 100 years the CIA will do anything it can to stop that report being made public.”The Guardian asked the CIA whether it had plans to revisit the question of whether the report could be published, and invited the agency to comment. It did not immediately respond.For all the uncertainty about the CIA’s intentions, calls for release of the full Senate report are growing. Prasow said that the US will find it all but impossible to close Guantánamo without grappling with the torture issue first.“The public has been sold a false story that torture victims were somehow less deserving of human rights protections. For far too long it’s been too easy to see torture victims as ‘other’. It’s time to bring them out into the light.”Denbeaux, Zubaydah’s lawyer, said that releasing the report would help fill in some of the void that was left in 2005 when the CIA destroyed videotapes of the torture of Zubaydah. “In the absence of the destroyed footage, the full Senate report would bring home to the American people the cumulative horror of how the torture worked, day after day, hour after hour, continuously, endlessly. This was a hideous awful thing, and they’d like us to forget about it?”Jones, the report’s chief author, said that were it to emerge in its totality it would “shut the book and remove any lingering doubts” – about the torture, about its ineffectiveness, and about the lies that were told. “There are so many examples in it of the CIA misleading Congress, the White House, the public.”Among the items still waiting to be revealed is a photograph that has never been made public that Jones and his team discovered of a waterboard that was stored at the notorious “Salt Pit”, a black site outside Bagram airbase in Afghanistan. The device appeared extremely well used, and in the photo it is seen surrounded by buckets of water and bottles of a peculiar pink solution.The photograph puzzled Jones and his team of investigators because there were no official records to indicate that waterboarding had ever been practiced at the Salt Pit. When the Senate team asked the CIA to explain the photograph, the agency said it had no answer.In the last analysis, Jones said that it all points to a massive failure of accountability – a failure that until the full report is made public will continue to gnaw away at the nation’s standing and self-respect. “We’ve failed at every level of accountability – criminal, civil and societal,” he said. “If this is never to happen again, there has to be a reckoning.”TopicsCIATortureSeptember 11 2001CIA torture reportGuantánamo BayUS politicsAl-QaidanewsReuse this content More

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      Guantánamo Bay at 20: why have attempts to close the prison failed?

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      The US prison in Cuba has been beset by allegations of torture since it was set up 20 years ago. But despite all the promises to close it down, it remains operational with no end in sight, says Julian Borger

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      The first prisoners arrived at the newly built Camp X-Ray prison at the US naval base in Cuba’s Guantánamo Bay on 11 January 2002. It was a makeshift jail formed of chain-link cages and barbed-wire fences, watched over by snipers in plywood guard towers. It was never intended to be permanent, but from the start it had an ambiguous legal status: outside normal US law, it housed what the military called ‘enemy combatants’, not prisoners of war. Twenty years on, approximately 780 prisoners have been held at Guantánamo in total. However, beset by allegations of abuse and torture at the camp, authorities have only been able to bring charges against 12 men and convictions against two. The Guardian’s world affairs editor, Julian Borger, tells Nosheen Iqbal that the murky legal status of Guantánamo Bay that made it so attractive to the US government in 2002 is now making it so difficult to close. Despite the hopes of three presidents (Bush, Obama and Biden, but not Trump) to close it, progress has been glacially slow. It requires the willingness of US allies to accept the transfer of prisoners, and while there was some momentum in the early phase of Obama’s presidency, it has since dried up. Meanwhile, 39 prisoners continue to spend their days inside Guantánamo, with little prospect of release for many of them. More