Documents reveal chained detainees worried Bush

By Associated Press In Washington | China Daily | Updated: 2016-06-17 08:22

Newly declassified documents offer more details about a detainee who died inside the secret prison network the CIA operated abroad after the Sept 11, 2001 attacks and disclose that then-president George W. Bush was worried about the image of shackled detainees wearing adult diapers.

Among the 50 documents released was a redacted memo in which then-CIA director Porter Goss recounts a meeting with Bush on June 7, 2006. The only sentence left to read said: "The president was concerned about the image of a detainee, chained to the ceiling, clothed in a diaper and forced to go to the bathroom on themselves."

Human rights advocates said on Wednesday that this week's release of the documents - many footnoted in the 2014 Senate report on torture of detainees - depict the human suffering associated with the CIA's interrogation program, which President Barack Obama said did damage to the standing of the United States.

"You read these documents and you cannot help come away with and understand the grotesqueness of the methods they were using," said Jameel Jaffer, deputy legal director at the American Civil Liberties Union.

"It's not like this (the interrogation program) was precisely calibrated. It was just abuse piled upon abuse."

Mistakes made

CIA Director John Brennan has said that the agency made mistakes and learned from them, but insisted the coercive techniques used on detainees produced intelligence "that helped thwart attack plans, capture terrorists and save lives". The CIA also has acknowledged, in a response to the Senate report, that its "lack of preparation and competencies resulted in significant lapses in the agency's ability to develop and monitor its initial detention and interrogation activities."

The ACLU's Jaffer cited the case of suspected extremist Gul Rahman, who was interrogated in late 2002 at a CIA detention facility in Afghanistan. He was shackled to a wall in his cell in "near-freezing confinement".

One afternoon, Rahman, who had been deemed uncooperative with interrogators, threw his food, water bottle and defecation bucket at guards and threatened them with death if he were released. Rahman was shackled using the "short chain" method. His hands were chained together. His feet were chained together. Then, a short chain was used to shackle his hands to his feet.

"This position forced Rahman, who was naked below the waist to sit on a cold concrete floor and prevented him from standing up," a report about his death said.