Over the weekend, news reports revealed that terror suspects are being held in a secret part of the prison at that Bagram air base for interrogation. They’re denied access to the International Committee of the Red Cross, and some have claimed they’ve been subjected to abuses, including sleep deprivation, sexual humiliation and other maltreatment similar to the sorts of interrogation abuses that occurred during the Bush administration.

Human Rights First is now calling for a full investigation of the so-called “black prison” at Bagram and the alleged abuses there.

“These allegations raise serious questions about whether reforms initiated by the Obama administration are being properly implemented and about whether they are sufficient to end torture and detainee abuse,” the organization wrote in a letter sent yesterday to Afghanistan Commander Vice-Admiral Robert Harward. “If substantiated, the alleged conduct of detaining authorities is in violation of U.S. law, including the Detainee Treatment Act, and the 2006 Army Field Manual, which is applicable to all U.S. government agencies. It is also in violation of international law, including Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, and the Convention against Torture.”

The letter asks that the results of the investigation be made public and that the perpetrators of abuses be held accountable.

In the process, he came across a curious fact. About three years ago, he says, the “entire prisoner death reporting system was turned off in Afghanistan.” And in Iraq, it was “turned off” at the beginning of 2008.

Before that time, says Miles, who’s on the board of the Center for Victims of Torture, the Department of Defense issued press releases about deaths of detainees in its custody. Miles was tracking those deaths and the role of physicians for his book, which was recently updated and republished as Oath Betrayed: America’s Torture Doctors by the University of California Press.  (The Pentagon never reported the deaths of detainees subjected to “extraordinary rendition,” he says — that is, those sent to other countries for interrogation, and sometimes to be tortured.) But the Pentagon did, at least, report some deaths of the prisoners it acknowledged it had in its custody.

Then “they just stopped reporting it,” says Miles. The press releases stopped.

It couldn’t be that no one died, Miles added, because “you have a certain expected death rate based on the size of the population. I’ve been able to trace all public death reports and can show when they turned them off.”

According to a draft paper he’s written, now being prepared for publication in the American Journal of Bioethics:

In May 2004, shortly after media published photographs of lethal abuse at Abu Ghraib prison, DoD disclosed 22 prisoner deaths; of which 12 (54%) were attributed to natural causes. DOD did not disclose another 67 deaths that occurred during that same period. Only 13 (15%) of the total 89 deaths were due to natural causes. By the end of 2008, 93 of 165 known decedents (56%) are unnamed. Death certificates are available for 37 (22%). Homicides and shelling of prisons are the leading causes of death. DoD has completely suppressed prisoner death reports from Afghanistan since 2004 and adopted a similar policy for Iraq in 2008.

The New York Times also reported back in 2004 that the Defense Department had provided incomplete or inaccurate information about deaths of prisoners in its custody.

I’ve asked several different spokesmen at the Department of Defense over the last few days to respond to this charge, to explain its policy for reporting detainee deaths, and to explain if that policy has changed since 2003. So far, I have received no response. 

But Devon Chaffee, Advocacy Counsel at Human Rights First, which reported in 2006 on about 100 deaths in U.S. custody since 2002 that it was able to learn about, was not surprised.

“Our report found that commanders failed to report deaths in custody. Sometimes they reported them days or weeks later. But there clearly was a reporting problem. Some were simply not reported at all,” she added, although Army regulations require that any deaths in U.S. custody be reported within 24 hours.

The report issued by Human Rights First, called Command’s Responsibility, found that from August 2002 until the release of the report in February 2006, nearly 100 detainees had died “while in the hands of U.S. officials in the global ‘war on terror.’”  Although the military had classified 34 of those cases as suspected or confirmed homicides, Human Rights First “identified another 11 in which the facts suggest death as a result of physical abuse or harsh conditions of detention. In close to half the deaths Human Rights First surveyed, the cause of death remains officially undetermined or unannounced. Overall, eight people in U.S. custody were tortured to death.”

In an ordinary war, the deaths of detainees would have to be reported publicly pursuant to the Geneva Conventions. But because President Bush early on declared that detainees in the “war on terror” are not technically “Prisoners of War” entitled to the protections the Geneva Conventions affords them, the U.S. military was apparently able to get around that reporting requirement.

Although at least some officials in the Obama administration have declared the “war on terror” over, the Obama DOD appears not to have resumed regular reporting on the deaths of prisoners in custody, says Miles. “It’s still shut down,” says Miles of the reporting system. “Obama hasn’t opened it up. It’s just mysterious to me.”

In the meantime, human rights organizations such as Human Rights First and others haven’t had the resources to keep their report of detainee deaths up-to-date, says Chafee.

I’ll report more as soon as I hear back from the Department of Defense about what their reporting policy is, whether it’s changed, and why human rights organizations have counted more deaths in custody than the government has acknowledged.

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In its document, the government argues that these documents are exempt from the Freedom of Information Act because they would reveal “intelligence sources and methods,” notwithstanding that the Obama administration has said it’s no longer using those abusive methods.

In that regard, it’s much like the Justice Department’s argument that courts must dismiss lawsuits that claim the government engaged in torture or warrantless wiretapping, because they would reveal “state secrets” — even though, supposedly, the government doesn’t do those secretive things anymore.

Advocates for accountability, at least, might find a silver lining here. The government’s insistence on keeping the evidence secret would seem to provide a strong argument for why Congress and Attorney General Eric Holder ought to conduct their own aggressive investigation.

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The business provided toilets, plumbing equipment, stereos, video games, bedding, night vision goggles, earplugs and wrap-around sunglasses. Some products were bought at Target and Wal-Mart, among other vendors, and flown overseas. Nothing exotic was required for the infamous waterboards — they were built on the spot from locally available materials, the officials said.

You have to rely on locally built waterboards. It’s the most cost-efficient way to torture someone and provide needed foreign assistance.More substantively, does it surprise anyone that a master of graft would bring his shady connections into CIA’s torture prisons? By the account provided by The Times — and, really, hats off for getting Foggo to talk while he’s serving prison time for fraud — Foggo did his job well. The black sites were secret. Foggo needed to equip them. Who better to turn to than his best friend? And if there were a few kickbacks, isn’t that to be expected? It seems surreal to expect that undocumented torture chambers be run according to the highest standards of governmental integrity.

One jail was a renovated building on a busy street in Bucharest, Romania, the officials disclosed. Another was a steel-beam structure at a remote site in Morocco that was apparently never used. The third, another remodeling project, was outside another former Eastern bloc city. They were designed to appear identical, so prisoners would be disoriented and not know where they were if they were shuttled back and forth. They were kept in isolated cells. [...]

Eventually, the agency’s network would encompass at least eight detention centers, including one in the Middle East, one each in Iraq and Afghanistan and a maximum-security long-term site at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, that was dubbed Strawberry Fields, officials said. (It was named after a Beatles song after C.I.A. officials joked that the detainees would be held there, as the lyric put it, “forever.”)

The C.I.A. has never officially disclosed the exact number of prisoners it once held, but top officials have put the figure at fewer than 100.

Also of note, The Times sheds some light on what life was like inside the prisons:

[T]he jails were small, and though they were built to house about a half-dozen detainees they rarely held more than four.

The cells were constructed with special features to prevent injury to the prisoners during interrogations: nonslip floors and flexible, plywood-covered walls to soften the impact of being slammed into the wall.

The detainees, held in cells far enough apart to prevent communication with one another, were kept in solitary confinement 23 hours a day. For their one hour of daily exercise, they were taken out of their cells by C.I.A. security officers wearing black ski masks to hide their identities and to intimidate the detainees, according to the intelligence officials.

Just like prisons in the United States, the jailers imposed a reward and punishment system: well-behaved detainees received books, DVDs and other forms of entertainment, which were taken away if they misbehaved, the officials said.

And the CIA operative charged with overseeing the creation of the network of secret jails: Kyle “Dusty” Foggo — whose name you may have heard before.

The last time I wrote about the case of Mohamed v. Jeppesen, the Obama Justice Department was asking the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals to re-hear the case, after a three-judge panel of that court refused to dismiss the victims’ claims on the grounds that the lawsuit would allegedly reveal sensitive “state secrets.” (For an excellent piece about the “state secrets” privilege and its dubious origins, listen here to “The Secret Life of Secrets” from last Sunday’s NPR program, This American Life.)

Because the lawsuit has so far been stalled and there’s no other apparent recourse with the U.S. government, the ACLU, which represents the plaintiffs in the Jeppesen case, has asked the U.N. human rights experts to investigate the circumstances surrounding Britel’s arrest, detention and interrogation in Pakistan and his secret transfer to Morocco; his imprisonment there without charge or trial; and his abusive interrogation there.

According to the ACLU, “Britel is one of the few victims of the United States’ “extraordinary rendition” program whose identities are known, and the only European citizen, to our knowledge, still detained. To this day, Britel remains incarcerated in a Moroccan prison.”

Nahal Zamani of the ACLU’s Human Rights Program recently spoke with Britel’s wife, Italian citizen Khadija Anna Lucia Pighizzini, and has posted an excerpt and translation of their conversation here.

It ends with this statement of hope from Pighizzini, which is extraordinary given that her husband has been imprisoned, tortured and abused since 2002, all without any logical explanation:

As for me, I am always tired, and always waiting. It’s been over seven long years since Kassim disappeared. These years have been so painful, but I know that the injustice that I’ve gone through will soon be over. I haven’t given way to hate; nor has Kassim. Instead, we’re waiting for his liberation. We want to live our lives, and to reclaim our rights to live in dignity as citizens and human beings. We look towards to the future; when truth will be heard, when our rights will be restored and when justice will finally be served.

The ICRC explains that Abu Zubaydah’s narrative begins in “May 2002,” after he had “been held in hospital for what he believes were several weeks” as he convalesced from a gunshot to his leg during his capture. Soufan discusses interrogating Abu Zubaydah from “March to June 2002, before the harsh techniques were introduced later in August.” I can’t really adjudicate the dispute. It could be that Abu Zubaydah is misremembering and the ICRC is going off what he told them. Or it’s possible that Abu Zubaydah is excluding discussions he had with people like Soufan or the CIA’s John Kiriakou from his hospital bed.  (Additionally, the ICRC said the interrogation took place in Afghanistan; I had understood it to take place in a Thai safe house.) I can’t explain it.

Continuing, this is all from stuff that Abu Zubaydah said took place before “the real torturing started.” He’s describing being “naked, strapped to a bed, in a very white room” that had “metal bars separating it from a larger room.” He was “shackled by hands and feet for what I think was the next 2 to 3 weeks,” which led to blistering on his legs.

I was given no solid food during the first two or three weeks, while sitting on the chair. I was only given Ensure [a nutrient supplement] and water to drink. At first the Ensure made me vomit, but this became less with time.

The cell and room were air-conditioned and were very cold. Very loud, shouting type music was constantly playing. It kept repeating about every fifteen minutes twenty-four hours a day. Sometimes the music stopped and was replaced by a loud hissing or crackling noise.

The guards were American, but wore masks to conceal their faces. My interrogators did not wear masks.

During this first two to three week period I was questioned for about one to two hours each day. American interrogators would come to the room and speak to me through the bars of the cell. During the questioning the music was switched off, but was then put back on again afterwards. I could not sleep at all for the first two to three weeks. If I started to fall asleep one of the guards would come and spray water in my face.

Presumably Soufan was one such interrogator. Even if we’re to go by the ICRC’s timetable, we’d still be in either late May or early June at this point, which overlaps with the time Soufan gives for his interrogations of Abu Zubaydah. Anyhow, during this time he “began to receive food, rice, to eat on a daily basis.” But he was kept “naked and in shackles,” a situation that continued for “another one and a half months.” A woman doctor “who asked why I was still naked” examined him after “about one and a half to two months,” which by the ICRC’s timetable would be mid June to early July for the period in which he was kept naked. After that he was given clothing. But:

[T]he next day guards came into my cell. They told me to stand up and raise my arms above my head. Then they cut the clothes off of me so that I was again naked and put me back on the chair for several days. I tried to sleep on the chair, but was again kept awake by the guards spraying water in my face.

When my interrogators had the impression I was cooperating and providing the information they required, the clothes were given back to me. When they felt I was being less cooperative the clothes were again removed and I was again put back on the chair. This was repeated several times.

There followed a period of either one month or two months — Abu Zubaydah seems like he’s repeating himself in the narrative — with no questioning. But then, “about two and a half or three months after I arrived in this place… the real torturing started.” This would, in either case, be either August or September, going off the May 2002 baseline. What he then describes is consistent with the post-August 2002 OLC approval of techniques like the “confinement box” and “walling”:

Two black wooden boxes were brought into the room outside my cell. One was tall, slightly higher than me and narrow. Measuring perhaps in area 1m x 0.75m and 2m in heigh. The other was shorter, perhaps only 1m in height. I was taken out of my cell and one of the interrogators wrapped a towel around my neck, they then used it to swing me around and smash me repeatedly against the hard walls of the room. I was also repeatedly slapped in the face. As I was still shackled, the pushing and pulling around meant that the shackles pulled painfully on my ankles.

I was then put into the tall back [I think this should be 'black'] box for what I think was about one and a half to two hours. The box was totally black on the inside as well as the outside…

And it goes on in that fashion, with descriptions of waterboarding, forced shaving and more, including an account that “I was told during this period I was one of the first to receive these interrogation techniques, so no rules applied. It felt like they were experimenting and trying out techniques to be used later on other people.”

In outline form, Abu Zubaydah’s account correlates with Soufan’s. There’s a period in which things are a certain way, and then a period where they get much worse for Abu Zubaydah. Examined with greater scrutiny, though, that earlier period is not a nice or pleasant one. Soufan never explicitly says otherwise. But he does say that during the period in which he interrogated Abu Zubaydah, he used “traditional interrogation methods.” Yet if Abu Zubaydah is to be believed, during this period he was subjected to a cold cell, prolonged nudity, prolonged shackling, constant noise, and what appears to be the manipulation of his sleep patterns. FBI agents might not recognize that as “traditional.”

Again, it could be that Abu Zubaydah is simply misremembering or misrepresenting his experience. But these are discrepancies worth exploring.

At least three dozen others who were held in the CIA’s secret prisons overseas appear to be missing as well. Efforts by human rights organizations to track their whereabouts have been unsuccessful, and no foreign governments have acknowledged holding them.

The CIA isn’t commenting on Linzer’s list of the known-suspected ghost detainees, but a spokesman calls such compilations “typically flawed.”

President George W. Bush (WDCpix)

A wealth of new details emerged Tuesday about how techniques designed to help captured U.S. troops resist torture formed the basis for the post-9/11 interrogation policies of the Bush-era Pentagon.

Instructors of those techniques proved to be eager in 2002 and 2003 to disseminate them to an emerging crop of inexperienced military interrogators facing the prospect of wresting information out of new captives. “I believe our niche lies in the fact that we can provide the ability to exploit personnel based on how our enemies have done this type of thing over the last five decades,” said Joseph Witsch, an instructor for the Joint Personnel Recovery Agency (JPRA), a component of U.S. Joint Forces Command that oversees the so-called Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Evasion (SERE) program for U.S. special forces, during a 2002 training session for U.S. military interrogators, according to a newly released report.

Illustration by: Matt Mahurin

Details like these came to light when an unclassified version of a Senate Armed Services Committee report on the Pentagon’s treatment of detainees in the war on terrorism (pdf) was made public late Tuesday. An unclassified executive summary of the report, released in December, gave the outlines of the narrative, an account of how extreme interrogation techniques never before considered legal for U.S. personnel to apply became widespread within the military. But the full extent of the story was unclear from the 21-page summary of the 200-page report.

JPRA, a previously obscure outpost inside the military command responsible for making the U.S. military services fight as a single entity, first emerged last year in committee hearings as a key element in the United States’ embrace of physical interrogation methods. Responsible for overseeing the SERE program around the military services, in which instructors in very controlled conditions teach U.S. troops how to endure and resist torture in enemy captivity. Such techniques, used by the Chinese and North Korean communist regimes, include waterboarding, sleep deprivation, and forced exposure to extremes of temperature — all of which were recommended by JPRA and SERE officials to U.S. interrogators.

Instructors in the SERE program and their overseers in JPRA are not trained interrogators. Before 9/11, SERE and JPRA never focused on applying their resistance training to interrogate captured enemies. “SERE instructors are not selected for their roles based on language skills, intelligence training, or expertise in eliciting information,” the committee report specifies.

Yet after 9/11, with President Bush’s declaration that the Geneva Conventions would not apply to al-Qaeda and Taliban captives, the Pentagon’s then-general counsel, Jim Haynes, began asking JPRA how SERE’s expertise could assist U.S. interrogators, a relatively small U.S. military cohort. JPRA officials, eager to help with U.S. military efforts against al-Qaeda, sought to help with minimal prompting. Col. John “Randy” Moulton proposed in February 2002 that JPRA send a team to the newly established detention and interrogation facility to create a “short course” about “interrogation from the resistance side.” It would be the first of several such courses developed throughout 2002 and 2003, in which JPRA and its SERE “resistance” experts helped U.S. military and, in some cases, CIA interrogators, “reverse-engineer” SERE procedures for use on detainees in Guantanamo Bay, Afghanistan, Iraq and, perhaps, the network of CIA secret prisons where the agency held “high-value” al-Qaeda captives.

A key figure is a SERE psychologist named Bruce Jessen. The chief psychologist frequently advised officials at Guantanamo Bay and the emerging cadre of U.S. interrogators in techniques designed to break U.S. soldiers. In April 2002, he created a Guantanamo Bay “exploitation draft plan” to provide SERE training to Guantanamo interrogators under his direction. He proposed the creation of an “exploitation facility” at Guantanamo that would be “off limits to non-essential personnel,” such as the press, the International Committee of the Red Cross, or foreign observers. He advised that “the “the only restricting factor” on what techniques interrogators ought to be permitted to employ “should be the Torture Convention,” though he defended the use of physical force in interrogations. He repeated that message to interrogators and Guantanamo officials throughout 2002.

The influence of Jessen and SERE was not limited to military interrogations. In July 2002, the Senate report discloses, he was sent to “another government agency” to offer advice; and a JPRA team assisted a squad from “another government agency” during the first six months of 2002 that would be “sent to interrogate a high level al Qaeda operative.” “Another government agency” is a widespread euphemism for the CIA. The month after Jessen went to advise the undisclosed agency, the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel issued a secret memorandum, disclosed last week, instructing the CIA as to what interrogation techniques it considered to fall short of statutory prohibitions on torture. It summarized what the CIA proposed for its interrogation of Abu Zubaydah, considered to be the highest-ranking al-Qaeda member in U.S. custody. “Zubaydah will have contact only with a new interrogation specialist, whom he has not met previously, and the Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape (“SERE”) training psychologist who has been involved with the interrogations since they began,” wrote Jay Bybee, the head of OLC, in an August 1, 2002 memorandum. It is unclear but likely that Jessen is the psychologist to which Bybee refers.

JPRA and SERE officials thought of themselves as a unique trove of information and training for U.S. interrogators. The report quotes one official as saying, “JPRA has the sole repository of the required skill set” for interrogating detainees, even though the FBI has interrogated criminals for over 100 years. At an interrogation training session in the summer of 2002, with Guantanamo officials present, SERE officials “drafted a memo proposing the use of physical and psychological pressures at [Guantanamo], including some pressures … that do not follow the Geneva Conventions,” according to the report.

Around that time, an aide to Pentagon chief lawyer Haynes, David Shiffrin, requested JPRA’s deputy commander to send him memoranda outlining what techniques SERE graduates had to endure. The response included “the facial slap, walling, the abdomen slap, use of water, the attention grab and stress positions.” One attached memo used the phrase “physical and/or psychological duress” interchangeably with “torture,” the report says.

By September 2002, Pentagon officials and Guantanamo interrogators had grown “frustrated” with their inability to collect as much useful intelligence from interrogations as they had expected from Guantanamo detainees, according to the report. A JPRA-sponsored training session for interrogators that month introduced the concept of exploiting “phobias” and playing off cultural sensitivities of Arabs and Muslims. JPRA instructor Joseph Witsch warned a superior, “We are out of our sphere when we begin to profess the proper ways to exploit these detainees,” but the training continued. Witsch later acknowledged to a Pentagon working group on interrogations, “The physical and psychological pressures we apply in training violate national and international laws. … I hope someone is explaining this to all these folks asking for our techniques and methodology!”

Several Pentagon officials were asking for precisely that. A “Behavioral Science Consultation Team” established at Guantanamo and in frequent contact with SERE advisers counseled a Guantanamo working group on whether the interrogators had “authorization to use interrogation approaches that had not been taught to interrogators” at the U.S. Army’s intelligence center and were not contained in its Field Manual on interrogations. One SERE adviser told the BSCT, “Bottom line: the likelihood that the use of physical pressures will increase the delivery of accurate information from a detainee is very low.” Yet the working group approved a decision — over some BSCT and SERE reservations — to recommend the use of expanded techniques on a high-value detainee named Mohammed al-Qatani that were “influenced by SERE,” according to the report.

That request went up through the chain of command in October, ultimately reaching Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld in December 2002. The report documents Haynes’ ability to stop a review of the techniques’ legality by a legal adviser to the Joint Chiefs of Staff, after representatives of the uniformed military made it clear that they considered the techniques to be illegal. As has been documented in numerous Pentagon inquiries stretching back to 2004, Rumsfeld ultimately recommended in April 2003 the use of several extreme interrogation techniques, including stress positions, dietary manipulation, “long time standing” and other techniques that are now revealed to have originated from SERE. Similarly, while Rumsfeld declared that those techniques were applicable only to “military and civilian interrogators assigned to Joint Task Force Guantanamo Bay, Cuba,” the extreme pressure for intelligence in Iraq later that year sent Guantanamo Bay’s commander, Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Miller, to Iraq, where he delivered a list of Guantanamo-approved techniques to the Iraq war commander, Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, with the explicit instruction to “Gitmo-ize” intelligence operations. A 2004 report by former Defense Secretary James Schlesinger found that instruction to be a central cause of the torture at the Abu Ghraib detention facility in late 2003.

The release of the Senate Armed Services Committee report comes on the heels of Thursday’s disclosure of four long-secret Justice Department documents outlining CIA interrogation techniques. Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.), chairman of the committee, explained in a statement that the two rounds of disclosure were coincidental. The Defense Department had been combing through the report since November 20 and only now approved it for release, Levin said, with some significant redactions of operational and other detail.

“The record established by the Committee’s investigation shows that senior officials sought out information on, were aware of training in, and authorized the use of abusive interrogation techniques,” Levin said. “Those senior officials bear significant responsibility for creating the legal and operational framework for the abuses. As the Committee report concluded, authorizations of aggressive interrogation techniques by senior officials resulted in abuse and conveyed the message that physical pressures and degradation were appropriate treatment for detainees in U.S. military custody.”

Since then, he has been considered a missing, or ghost detainee [6]. But in the heavily redacted OLC memo [7] dated May 30, 2005, government censors appeared to have missed a single reference to his name and confinement during a lengthy description of the interrogation techniques used against him. The reference can be found at the bottom of Page 7 in the memo [7], where Ghul’s surname is spelled “Gul.” …

So it appears we now have evidence Ghul was in a CIA prison. Where he is today is still a mystery.