As summarized in Eugene Robinson’s WaPo column:
After years of stonewalling, the Bush administration in October 2006 allowed the Red Cross to interview 14 Guantanamo detainees who had previously been held and interrogated in the CIA’s secret prisons. Among them were several men who almost certainly played major roles in planning and executing the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, including Khalid Sheik Mohammed and Ramzi Binalshib. Others, such as Abu Zubaydah, now seem to have had less involvement in the attacks than once believed.
The 14 men told remarkably similar stories. After being arrested – whether in Pakistan, Dubai, Thailand or Djibouti – they were blindfolded, shackled and flown to an interrogation center that all of them identified as being in Afghanistan. This was probably the prison facility at the U.S.-run Bagram air base north of Kabul. Twelve of the 14 said they were tortured.
Three of the detainees reported being subjected to suffocation by water – the torture known as waterboarding. Abu Zubaydah’s account of the experience is quoted at length in the report: “I was put on what looked like a hospital bed, and strapped down very tightly with belts. A black cloth was then placed over my face and the interrogators used a mineral water bottle to pour water on the cloth so that I could not breathe. After a few minutes the cloth was removed and the bed was rotated into an upright position. The pressure of the straps on my wounds caused severe pain. I vomited. The bed was then again lowered to a horizontal position and the same torture carried out.”
Ten of the detainees said they were forced to stand in an excruciatingly painful position for days at a time, with their hands chained to a bar above their heads. If you don’t believe that’s torture, try it – and see if you last five minutes. One detainee, Walid Bin Attash, had an artificial leg, which he said his CIA jailers sometimes removed to make the “stress standing position” more agonizing.
Nine of the men said they were subjected to daily beatings in the first weeks of their detention. Abu Zubaydah said he was sometimes confined for long periods in boxes designed to constrict his movement – one of them tall and narrow, the other so short that he could only squat in an awkward and painful position.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/04/09/AR2009040903523.html
A few questions here. First, if this kind of treatment is not considered torture, and these detainees were suspected of involvement in the 9/11 attacks, why did only 12 of 14 allege it? Either two caved early and didn’t require extreme interrogation techniques, or they don’t consider this kind of treatment torture? Second, waterboarding and daily beatings aside, how does stringing up a suspect with shackles, for days on end (in one case, on one leg), not constitute torture, by anyone’s definition? Third, if these reports are true, and the Obama administration determines these acts meet the legal definition of torture, does it not have an obligation to investigate and bring charges when the facts warrant prosecution, at every complicit link in the chain of command?