WASHINGTON (CNN) — Here’s a look at some of the techniques the CIA used to interrogate detainees that were included in a Senate Intelligence Committee report released Tuesday.
1. The CIA conducted at least two mock executions — among other techniques that went unreported in the agency’s cables. Others included “nudity, dietary manipulation, exposure to cold temperatures, cold showers,” and rough takedowns.
In another passage, the mock executions are included in a section that also mentions techniques like “placing pressure on a detainee’s artery … blowing cigarette or cigar smoke into a detainee’s face, using cold water to interrogate detainees, and subjecting a detainee to a ‘hard takedown.'”
2. Those “rough” or “hard” takedowns involved CIA officers rushing into a detainee’s cell, stripping him naked and running him up and down a long hall while slapping and punching him. “As they ran him along the corridor, a couple of times he fell and they dragged him through the dirt,” the report says.
3. The CIA often used sleep deprivation, which “involved keeping detainees awake for up to 180 hours, usually standing or in stress positions, at times with their hands shackled above their heads.”
4. The CIA decided that interrogating Abu Zubaydah would take precedence over his medical care. He almost died as a result of waterboarding. In at least one waterboarding session, Abu Zubaydah “became completely unresponsive, with bubbles rising through his open, full mouth.” He remained unresponsive until medical intervention, when he regained consciousness and expelled “copious amounts of liquid.”
5. The first prisoner at the COBALT detention facility, Redha al-Najar, was kept in “isolation in total darkness.” The CIA gave him increasingly worse food, kept him in uncomfortably cold temperatures, kept him shackled and hooded and played music 24 hours a day. He wore a diaper and had no access to toilets. And he was described as being left hanging — with one or both wrists handcuffed to an overhead bar so he couldn’t lower his arms — for 22 hours a day for two straight days in an attempt to “‘break’ his resistance.”
6. The CIA threatened the families of detainees. It used that prisoner’s “fear for the well-being of his family to our benefit,” according to the report, by “using ‘vague threats’ to create a ‘mind virus.'” In another section, the report says “CIA officers also threatened at least three detainees with harm to their families — to include threats to harm the children of a detainee, threats to sexually abuse the mother of a detainee and a threat to ‘cut [a detainee’s] mother’s throat.'”
