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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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      in US Politics

      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

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      in US Politics

      Inside the CIA’s secret Kabul base, burned out and abandoned in haste

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      The ObserverAfghanistanInside the CIA’s secret Kabul base, burned out and abandoned in haste A Taliban commander invited the media to inspect the site where America plotted killing raids and tortured prisonersEmma Graham-Harrison in KabulSun 3 Oct 2021 01.00 EDTThe cars, minibuses and armoured vehicles that the CIA used to run its shadow war in Afghanistan had been lined up and incinerated beyond identification before the Americans left. Below their ashy grey remains, pools of molten metal had solidified into permanent shiny puddles as the blaze cooled.The faux Afghan village where they trained paramilitary forces linked to some of the worst human rights abuses of the war had been brought down on itself. Only a high concrete wall still loomed over the crumpled piles of mud and beams, once used to practise for the widely hated night raids on civilian homes.The vast ammunition dump had been blown up. Many ways to kill and maim human beings, from guns to grenades, mortars to heavy artillery, laid out in three long rows of double-height shipping containers, were reduced to shards of twisted metal. The blast from the huge detonation, which came soon after the bloody bomb at Kabul airport, shook and terrified the capital city.All formed part of the CIA compound that for 20 years was the dark, secret heart of America’s “war on terror”, a place were some of the worst abuses to sour the mission in Afghanistan would fester.The sprawling hillside compound, spread over two square miles north-east of the airport, became infamous early on in the conflict for torture and murder at its “Salt Pit” prison, codenamed Cobalt by the CIA. The men held there called it the “dark prison”, because there was no light in their cells, the only occasional illumination coming from the headlamps of their guards.It was here that Gul Rahman died of hypothermia in 2002 after he was chained to a wall half-naked and left overnight in freezing temperatures. His death prompted the first formal CIA guidelines on interrogation under a new regime of torture, eviscerated in a 2014 report that found that the abuse did not provide useful intelligence.The base has for two decades been a closely guarded secret, visible only in satellite photos, navigated by the testimony of survivors. Now the Taliban’s special forces have moved in and recently, briefly, opened up the secret compound to journalists.“We want to show how they wasted all these things that could have been used to build our country,” said Mullah Hassanain, a commander in the Taliban’s elite 313 unit, who led the tour of destroyed and burnt-out compounds, “burn pits” and incinerated cars, buses and armoured military vehicles.Taliban special forces include suicide attackers who recently marched through Kabul to celebrate seizing the capital. Vehicles now emblazoned with their official “suicide squadron” logo escorted journalists around the former CIA base.It was a grimly ironic juxtaposition of the most cruel and ruthless units on both sides of this war, a reminder of the suffering inflicted on civilians by all combatants in the name of higher goals, over several decades.“They are martyrdom seekers who were responsible for the attacks on important locations of invaders and the regime. They now have control of important locations,” said a Taliban official, when asked why suicide squads were escorting journalists, and if they would continue to operate. “It is a very big battalion. It is responsible for the security of important locations. They will be expanded and further organised. Whenever there is a need, they will respond. They are always ready for sacrifices for our country and the defence of our people.”They planned to use the CIA base for their own military training, Hassanain said, so this brief glimpse of the compound is likely to be both the first and last time the media is allowed in.The men guarding it had already changed into the tiger-stripe camouflage of the old Afghan National Directorate of Security, the spy agency once in charge of hunting them down. The paramilitary units that operated here, based in barracks just near the site of the former Salt Pit jail, included some that were among the most feared in the country, mired in allegations of abuse that included extrajudicial killings of children and other civilians. The barracks had been abandoned so fast that the men who lived there left food half-finished, and barracks floors were littered with possessions spilled out of emptied lockers, cleared in an apparent frenzy.Mostly they had taken or destroyed anything with names, or ranks, but there were 01 patches, and one book that was filled with handwritten notes from weeks of training.Nearby, the site of the Salt Pit jail had apparently been razed a few months earlier. A New York Times satellite investigation found that, since spring, a cluster of buildings inside this part of the CIA compound had been levelled.Taliban officials said they did not have any details about the Salt Pit, or what had happened to the former jail. Rahman’s family are still searching for his body, which has never been returned to them.Other torture techniques recorded at the site included “rectal feeding”, shackling prisoners to bars overhead, and depriving inmates of toilet “privileges”, leaving them naked or wearing adult diapers.Construction equipment was abandoned on the site, with concrete slabs half poured. Next door, a building that had once been fortified with high-tech doors and equipment had apparently been firebombed, its interior as totally destroyed and reduced to ash as the cars outside.Destroying sensitive equipment at the base would have been complex, and there was evidence of several burn pits where everything from medical kits and a manual on leadership was put to the flames, along with larger pieces of equipment.The Taliban officials were jumpy about letting journalists into areas that had not been officially cleared. They had found several booby trap bombs in the rubble of the camp, Hassanain said, and were worried that there might be more.For days, helicopters ferried hundreds of people from the base to inside the airport, where men from the 01 force – aware they were likely to be prominent targets for reprisals – helped secure the perimeter in return for evacuation in the final hours, under a deal struck with the US.Untouched nearby was a recreation hall with snooker, ping-pong, darts and table football gathering dust. A box in the corner held brain teaser puzzles. It was unclear what the Taliban, once so austere that they even banned chess, would do with the trappings of western military downtime.TopicsAfghanistanThe ObserverTalibanCIACIA torture reportSouth and Central AsiaTortureWar crimesfeaturesReuse this content More

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      in Elections

      ‘Tell Us if He’s Dead’: Abductions and Torture Rattle Uganda

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      Hundreds have been detained, many brutalized, after a bloody, contested election. The government of Yoweri Museveni appears intent on breaking the back of the opposition.KAMPALA, Uganda — Armed men in white minivans without license plates picked up people off the streets or from their homes.Those snatched were taken to prisons, police stations and military barracks where they say they were hooded, drugged and beaten — some left to stand in cellars filled with water up to their chests.The fear is still so palpable in the capital, Kampala, that many others have gone into hiding or left the country.Three months after Uganda’s president, Yoweri Museveni, won a sixth five-year term in office in the most fiercely contested election in years, his government appears to be intent on breaking the back of the political opposition. The president of Uganda, a strategically located country in East Africa, is a longtime U.S. military ally and major recipient of American aid.His principal challenger, Bobi Wine, a magnetic musician-turned-lawmaker who galvanized youthful crowds of supporters, is now largely confined to his house in Kampala. Mr. Wine’s party said on Friday that 623 members, supporters and elected officials have been seized from the streets and arrested in recent weeks, many of them tortured.The musician-turned-oppostion politician Bobi Wine is now largely confined to his home, his party members and supporters arrested.Esther Ruth Mbabazi for The New York TimesFor many Ugandans, the enforced disappearances suggest a slide toward the repressive policies of dictators such as Idi Amin and Milton Obote — who was ousted by Mr. Museveni. Ugandans now say they worry that President Museveni, after 35 years in power, is adopting some of the harsh tactics used by the autocrats he railed against decades ago.“I didn’t know if I was going to make it out dead or alive,” said Cyrus Sambwa Kasato, his eyes darting as he spoke, his hand tugging at the rosary around his neck. A district councilor with Mr. Wine’s opposition party, he said he was held at military intelligence headquarters, his hands chained to the ceiling, whipped by several men at once.President Museveni has acknowledged arresting 242 people, branding them “terrorists” and “lawbreakers,” and admitted that an elite commando unit had “killed a few.” But he denied that his government was disappearing its own citizens.Cyrus Sambwa Kasato, a district councilor with the opposition party,  said he was held at military intelligence headquarters, chained to the ceiling and whipped.Esther Ruth Mbabazi for The New York TimesA military spokesman, Lt. Col. Deo Akiiki, said in an email, “Terrorism has changed the modus operandi of some security operations across the world.”He defended the use of the unmarked white vans, saying that using “unidentifiable means of transport” was not unique to Uganda and that other countries — including the United States and Britain — have deployed similar methods to deal with “hard-core criminals.” He added that military officers are well trained in upholding human rights.The detentions and disappearances, in Uganda’s central region and elsewhere in the country, have targeted both young and middle-aged men and women.Some of those detained say they had collected evidence of vote tampering to present to the Supreme Court to challenge the official election results — which gave Mr. Museveni 59 percent of the vote to 34 percent for Mr. Wine. Mr. Wine has since dropped his challenge.Many of those who agreed to be interviewed were initially afraid to meet, fearing that journalists were actually government operatives. They asked to meet in public spaces or in party offices. Most did not want their names used for fear of retribution.They said uniformed soldiers or plainclothes gunmen whisked them away in unmarked minivans, known as “drones,” and shuffled them between prisons, police stations and military barracks — making it hard for their families and lawyers to find them.Campaign billboards for President Museveni, who was elected to his sixth five-year term.Esther Ruth Mbabazi for The New York TimesThey were ordered to turn over evidence of vote-rigging, accused of orchestrating violence and participating in an American plot to start a “revolution.” Mr. Museveni has claimed that the opposition was receiving support from “outsiders” and “homosexuals” who don’t like the “stability of Uganda.”Some said they were charged in a military court with possessing “military stores,” including the red berets worn by supporters of Mr. Wine, which the government banned in 2019.David Musiri, a member of Mr. Wine’s National Unity Platform Party, said he was shopping at a supermarket in Kampala on Jan. 18 when six gunmen in plainclothes assaulted him and injected him twice with a substance that made him lose consciousness.Mr. Musiri, 30, said he was placed in solitary confinement with his hands and feet tied together. Like most of those arrested, he said that his jailers interrogated him about what they called “Plan B” — Mr. Wine’s postelection strategy.Soldiers made him listen to recordings of his own phone calls with party officials, and kicked and hit him so much that he started urinating blood, he said. When he was released four days later, he couldn’t walk.“We are the very people funding the dictator to do this to us,” he said.David Musiri, a member of the opposition party, said soldiers beat him so badly he couldn’t walk, and interrogated him about a suspected “Plan B.”Esther Ruth Mbabazi for The New York TimesMr. Kasato, the district councilor, said that plainclothes officers picked him up from a church meeting on Feb. 8, threw him, hooded, into a car and clobbered him.He said the men asked him for the evidence of election rigging he’d collected, and whether he had sent it to Mr. Wine’s party. He said, yes, he had.Mr. Kasato, a 47-year-old father of 11, said that while he was chained to the ceiling, his feet barely touching the ground, military officers whipped him with a wire and pulled at his skin with pliers. “It was a big shock,” he said. “I was praying deeply that I really survive that torture.”In late February, Mr. Kasato was charged with inciting violence during the November protests in which security forces killed dozens of people — accusations he denies. He has been released on bail, but said he was still in intense physical pain, and that his doctors advised he seek medical attention abroad.Analysts say that Mr. Museveni, 76, who has ruled Uganda since 1986, is trying to avoid history repeating itself. He himself was a charismatic young upstart who accused his predecessor, Mr. Obote, of rigging an election, and led an armed rebellion that after five years managed to take power.Mr. Wine, 39, whose real name is Robert Kyagulanyi, has become the face of this young movement, promising to shake up the country’s stifled politics. As his campaign gained ground last year, he was arrested and beaten and placed under de facto house arrest.“We are seeing a movement toward full totalitarianism in this country,” said Nicholas Opiyo, a leading human rights lawyer. He was abducted last December and released, charged with money laundering after his legal advocacy group received a grant from American Jewish World Service, a New York-based nonprofit.“I have never felt as restricted and constrained as I am today,” said Nicholas Opiyo, a human rights lawyer, who was detained.Esther Ruth Mbabazi for The New York TimesAfter years of working to defend civil liberties in Uganda, Mr. Opiyo said, “I have never felt as restricted and constrained as I am today,” adding, “It feels like the noose is tightening on our neck.”Authorities have started releasing some of those forcibly disappeared following weeks of public outcry.On a March morning in Kyotera, a town 110 miles southwest of the Ugandan capital, news spread that 18 of the 19 local people who went missing had been returned.One was Lukyamuzi Kiwanuka Yuda, a 30-year-old trader who was taken from his home on the night of Jan. 8. Mr. Yuda said that 15 to 20 men in black counterterrorism police uniforms broke down his door, beat him and asked whether he was training “the rebels.”Lukyamuzi Kiwanuka Yuda, embraced by friends upon his release, said he was detained for more than 70 days in a hood and shackles.Esther Ruth Mbabazi for The New York TimesFor more than 70 days, he said, he and others detained with him remained hooded and shackled, allowed to lift their hoods only up to their lips when eating their one meal a day.“We would count the days based on when the meal for the day arrived,” he said, while continuously gazing at the sky. When asked why he kept looking up, he said, “I miss the sun.”In the hours after the reunion, neighbors and local officials gathered, cheering, ululating and hugging the returnees. A tent was pitched, and soon families arrived dressed in their best as a pastor delivered a prayer of thanks.But one resident quietly slipped out.After rushing over, Jane Kyomugisha did not find her brother among those released. Her brother, who is 28, had run in the local council election as an independent. He was taken away on Jan. 19 and has not been seen since. Ms. Kyomugisha said she has asked about him at numerous police stations, but in vain.“I feel a lot of pain that others have come back and my brother is not here,” she said in an interview at her convenience store in town. With each passing day, she feels more hopeless.“They should tell us if he’s dead,” she said. “Give us back the body and let our hope end there.”Jane Kyomugisha said that her brother, who ran as an independent in a local council election, was abducted in January and has not been seen since.Esther Ruth Mbabazi for The New York Times More