Guantanamo Bay detainee sustained brain damage after serving as CIA live prop
Excessive torture included waterboarding, walling, sexual humiliation, beating, and sleep deprivation.
-
Members of the World Can't-Wait perform a live waterboarding demonstration in New York.
Ammar Al-Baluchi, also known as Ali Abdul Aziz Ali, is a 44-year-old Pakistani citizen born in Kuwait who is currently detained by the United States at the Guantanamo Bay detention camp in Cuba.
The military prison in Cuba -- created after the September 2001 attacks to house detainees in the US so-called "war on terror"-- is still operating despite international and local calls to close it.
A group of UN experts has repeatedly urged Washington to finally close the site of "unrelenting human rights violations".
Al-Baluchi is one of five detainees facing the death penalty on suspicion of conspiring in the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.
For years, Al-Baluchi was subjected to excessive torture at the hands of CIA interrogators who used him as a live prop, a training tool for employees learning the agency's cruel and illegal practices.
Al-Baluchi suffered from brain damage after being exploited as a live prop for trainee interrogators at a secret CIA black site in Afghanistan for years, newly declassified documents revealed.
The 2008 report, which was declassified during his lawyers' attempt to obtain an independent medical examination, detailed how the now-44-year-old detainee was subjected to walling, a CIA-approved "enhanced interrogation technique."
During the practice, Al-Baluchi was slammed into a wall, doused with water, and slapped multiple times in the face and stomach. For nearly an hour, he was also forced to lean at an angle against a wall using only his forehead and to kneel backward to an extreme degree.
According to one interrogator, the goal was to "bounce" the detainee off the wall.
Al-Baluchi was "naked for the proceedings," the report unmasked.
It is worth mentioning that the CIA's so-called "enhanced interrogation techniques," many of which are now considered torture, were approved by the Pentagon and developed by so-called "psychologists" James Mitchell and John Jessen, who were paid $81 million for their efforts to invent and put the tactics into widespread use.
Rectal feeding, hanging by handcuffs, and waterboarding were listed among the abuse tactics adopted.
“In the case of ‘walling’ in particular the [Office of the Inspector General] had difficulty determining whether the session was designed to elicit information from Ammar or to ensure that all interrogator trainees received their certification,” the report added.
It also stated that the CIA's logic for justifying the detention was "fuzzy and circular," and that the abuse provided no useful intelligence.
As Al-Baluchi and others await lengthy pre-trial hearings, questions about the legal admissibility of testimony obtained by the US following acts of torture have arisen.
A group of UN experts has lately described the Guantanamo Bay prison which is run by the US Navy, first opened to detainees on January 10, 2002, as a site of "unparalleled notoriety" and a "stain" on Washington's stated commitment to the rule of law.
Once holding nearly 800 people seized around the world and transported to the Cuba facility, today the Guantanamo jail holds around 39 men, some of them from the very first months after it opened.
A number of those remaining were subjected to torture by CIA interrogators in the first years of the post-9/11 detention program.
Experts pointed out that between 2002 and 2021, nine detainees died in custody -- seven of them reportedly from suicide. None of the torturers or supervisors have yet been charged.
